


Strange Ways

by kyanve



Series: Truce [6]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Coran is actual space dad, Filling in Blanks, Found Family, Gen, Lotor is not Space Zuko he's Space Kuja, Pidge and Green now own the soul of one (1) Blade Historian, Psychic Connections, Worldbuilding, brief visit to alternate reality, everyone has plenty of issues, mostly canon-compliant, off duty Blades are an upturned box of ferrets, one day this will have a tag cloud as messy as its predecessor, the Lions are eldritch beings in the Fear Not sense, today is not that day
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2019-09-16 01:16:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16944240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyanve/pseuds/kyanve
Summary: Main sequel/continuation for Truce.  Voltron relies on the connections between all the paladins and their lions, but that can be a rocky situation, especially now that things have been thrown off and rearranged.  The lions mostly know what they're doing, but the same can't be said for any of the squishy mortals involved.As with Truce, this will follow alongside canon, going in gaps and bits between and off-camera things, starting with Hole in the Sky and going until it feels like there's a breakpoint.  Tags will update as new chapters are added.





	1. The Real Monsters Lie Between The Light And The Shade

The Blade were beginning to distance themselves from the Castle. Lotor was definitely more directly active than Zarkon had been, confirming Keith's fears, and the current Coalition with the Blade's support was scrambling to hold outlying worlds under feints and test assaults. There was a pattern to it, but not one that made it easier to predict - Lotor was aiming for transit points and less fortified places in between others, a bid to break up communications and coordination.

There were also chunks of the Galra fleet that were clearly placed where they _could_ move in easily on the joints he was testing, but were not, an arrangement that had Kolivan as uneasy as everyone else. Lotor could do more damage, but was holding back, and nobody wanted to learn the hard way what he was waiting for. 

It made it a surprise when Kolivan docked with the Castle on a small Blade ship, a quiet stealth visit of the sort that would only occur if there was something he needed to do in person.

They gathered on the bridge, a quiet collection with Kolivan solemn and stern.

"The official statement within the Empire has not changed, nor the reports from what eyes we have on Central Command. They claim that Zarkon is convalescing, recovering from the injuries Voltron dealt him under the care of the High Priestess herself."

Kolivan paused, giving that a moment to sink in.

"His chambers have been sealed to other entrants, and Haggar has been in them much of the time, preoccupied; the official news was that she summoned Lotor out of exile to manage the Empire until his father recovered."

After how much they'd lost to that harrowing fight, it was a possibility none of them wanted to think about.

"She might just be making that up, right? Like trying to keep people from figuring out he's dead?" Hunk was hopeful, but sounded like he didn't believe it and was hoping for help convincing himself of it.

Kolivan tilted his head. "Possible, but extremely unlikely in this case. She would not attempt a ruse she couldn't maintain, and she knows she'll need to produce Zarkon or a convincing facsimile sooner or later - sooner, if she wants to keep the Empire from fragmenting. It's likely that some shred of him remains; it is merely a matter of how much she has to work with."

"I take it sneaking into his chambers with a wooden stake isn't an option," Lance grumbled; Kolivan gave him a brief, baffled squint, then shook his head and continued. 

"If it's merely bits of residue worn into his corpse from the millenia, then it will take her time; she was working on energetic servant-constructs capable of taking over a body. Most of the difficulties in that research had to do with getting the construct to form stably enough in the face of inherent resistances, and not all of that difficulty was Ulaz's sabotage." 

It gave Keith a chill and more worry for Shiro; if the Galra had their hands on him again, there was no Ulaz to meddle on his behalf. 

He was distracted enough by that to almost startle when Pidge picked up Kolivan's explanation, wrinkling her nose. "But if Zarkon's basically been a glorified lich relying on raw power to keep his body moving all this time, and we shredded most of that, then it would basically be like installing an AI to replace a missing brain - there wouldn't be the resistance of an existing structure to overcome." 

Kolivan nodded. "It's also possible that enough survived for it to be a matter of her finding ways to patch over the damage caused. Either way, she seems confident she can drag whatever is left of him back to its feet again, but it's difficult to gauge how long we have until that happens without some clue how much survived your assault. And that," he shifted, pointedly turning his attention to Keith, "Is why I came here." 

Keith had a clue where this was going, and didn't like it.

"You can communicate with the Black Lion, yes?"

Keith frowned. "...Yeah, but -" He folded his arms, shifting his weight to one foot. "It's pretty hard to understand - like a lot it tries to 'say' doesn't work right with a human brain... and Shiro and the lion went through a lot to lock him out so he couldn't track us to your base. I don't know how much it'd be able to tell." 

Kolivan half-nodded. "Until we hear from our operative on Feyiv, it is the best lead we have - and may be the most accurate even then."

Keith grimaced, but nodded. "Let's get to the hangar and get this over with, then."

They probably didn't need everyone to pile down to the hangar, but Keith knew better than to suggest everyone else waiting on the bridge no matter how uncomfortable and self-conscious he was about the whole thing. They all had too much stake in it.

The lion had already picked up on his intent before he'd entered the cockpit where he could hear it better; it was quiet and guarded while he settled into the pilot's seat.

"Yeah I don't like this either, but it's better than asking someone to try to break into where he is."

There was a mental snort; everyone, the lion included, knew that trying to break into Zarkon's chambers to investigate would be a suicide mission that would accomplish nothing. 

"So. Do you think you can tell anything without letting whatever's left of him in?" After everything they'd went through and how much Zarkon had managed to mess with the lion before, he didn't want the lion to try if it wasn't sure it could do it safely.

That earned him fond amusement from the Black Lion, then stillness as its attention went cautiously elsewhere.

It continued long enough for Keith to grow restless, worrying about what was going on but not wanting to disturb the lion and possibly throw things off. 

Then, finally, the lion's attention snapped back to him and the hangar. It took a couple minutes to form the impressions the lion was trying to get across into something that translated, but the eventual message was tattered rags; something not dead, but missing so many parts that it was being kept alive, a brain and set of lungs propped up and artificially maintained that wouldn't survive on their own.

Zarkon wasn't dead, but couldn't be called 'alive' in even the sense of the twisted undead state he'd been in for the last ten thousand years. 

Keith sighed, patting the arm of the pilot's seat.

"Thanks."

The lion purred, an audible rumble noticeable to everyone in the hangar.

Everyone was ringed around expectantly when the lion bent down to let him out, only Kolivan staying still to wait for an answer. Keith let the lion stand back up straight, gathering himself to sort how to even word this. 

"The bad news is, he's not dead." 

Lance and Hunk both staggered back with melodramatic groaning wails, leaning on each other; Allura sputtered with a twitch and a mass of tangled unpleasant emotion, and Pidge joined the other two with a more angry noise of frustration.

"The good news is, there's not really much left, and he's only 'surviving' because he's being forcibly held together." 

Some of the outburst slid into relief, although he heard Lance grumbling a few expletives his way. 

Kolivan gave a half-relieved, resigned nod. "If you give as much detail as you can of what the lion was able to convey, I will bring it back to our researchers to see if we can gauge how long we might have." 

Keith nodded to that; it wouldn't be as much as they were hoping, he was sure, but it would be something.

The worst part was, after seeing how Lotor handled things differently, he was almost hoping it was sooner rather than later.

********************************

Coran had been just as intent on the distress signal as Allura when they picked up on it; he'd even taken the time to run extra checks, scanning for machine addresses of the source transmitters. 

It was old Altean, with minimal alteration and none of it showing hallmarks of Galran technology. Thanks to conversations with Kolivan, he knew an Altean beacon would be difficult to find; Zarkon had been going out of his way to erase anything substantial of Altea, to the point that most of the Blade's knowledge of the Altean people came from negative space, secondhand accounts and digging out bits of the truth by reading between the lines on the Official Imperial Dogma. Coran had been holding out hope that Alteans would be good enough at hiding for there to be others out there somewhere. There was some slim possibility it was a trap as Keith had feared, Lotor varying tactics to something more clever and underhanded than his father would've done, but if it was Alteans behind the beacon - 

Then the situation would have to be incredibly dire for them to risk drawing attention, after ten thousand years of the Empire trying to erase all trace of their existence.

The ship at the other end did not make the situation any more comforting. He knew it well; Commodore Trayling had been one of Alfor's most trusted explorers and expedition leaders, a quiet, sharp-eyed man, cautious and slow to reach conclusions, good at discretion and easily overlooked. He knew the strange glowing anomaly around it as well after a fashion, although he didn't want to believe it was what it resembled at first.

Until the various sensors and attempts at investigation confirmed that it was raw quintessence spilling out, he had almost convinced himself it couldn't be; after all, the rift he'd seen had been gouged into the side of a planet and looked very different for it. 

Allura didn't know as much about it, and that made it worse, because he knew just enough to know that he knew nothing. Rationally, with any phenomena he understood better, there'd be no way for the Commodore or any of his people to have survived for ten thousand years, and the beacon would've been found before this if it'd been blaring into the void of space all this time, even if it was transmitting on a more secure frequency with scrambling protocols to avoid any non-Altean ship picking up on it - something that was a rare practice in the days of the old Coalition.

The last he'd heard of Commodore Trayling was just before everything had gone wrong. Alfor had made offhand mention of some routine survey check on some unusual readings from a probe, and Coran had forgotten about it entirely in the chaos; now, with a Rift in front of him, he didn't need to see record to know what Alfor's gambit had been - Alfor had found something after Zarkon had completely withdrawn, he no longer trusted Zarkon and Honerva, he didn't want to risk them finding it with whatever they'd been working on that'd strained his incredibly close friendship to the point of Alfor no longer being welcome on Daibazaal.

They shouldn't be alive after all this time, the Rift had strange effects on time and space, there was no way they could've survived, the Rift's extreme concentrations of pure Quintessence had strange effects on living things, going out to it was too dangerous to risk, not going out to it risked Lotor and the Empire exploiting whatever Alfor had tried to hide from them.

The old paladins that had stayed in Voltron had been fine on returning before. They were the only ones who could continue Alfor's work with this; he kept telling himself that as Voltron moved toward the Rift and the ship trapped in it, keeping contact the whole way.

Then they weren't in contact, and then they were gone. 

It was hard not to see Daibazaal's outline and those horrible, long few doboshes of silence before the Rift began acting strangely and Voltron re-emerged slumped oddly and staggering. He almost didn't notice the mice at first, even with them climbing him to reach the console for a better look at the viewscreen; it took several ticks of frantic squeaking and waving for them to get his attention.

Even if they couldn't talk, it wasn't that hard to follow the charades and noise for this.

"I - I don't know. I mean, I know something, but it's not enough..."

Four pairs of tiny eyes fixed on him, and he swallowed.

"There was a planet before, and other things going on, it's not the same this time - I." Keith was not Zarkon, and Keith hadn't wanted to go; the only one with any reason to be tempted to step outside of Voltron to get a better look - 

"I don't know. As long as they all stay in Voltron and are careful, they should be alright. I think. If it's like before, sort of." He slumped at the console. "I have no idea, but there's nothing we can do now but wait and see if we can figure out a way to pick up on them again." 

He didn't need to understand them to know there was swearing and anxious panic in all of the squeaking.

******************************************

They were fine when they came through; Keith had braced for the worst without even an idea what 'the worst' might be, even though the Black Lion was guardedly confident that they would probably be okay.

He didn't like it when the Lion seemed to be weighing variables and coming up with 'maybes'. 

The lion agreed with Pidge's assessment that they were in the same place and hadn't ended up getting wormholed somewhere weird, but he could also feel the Black Lion doing what felt honestly like the god-beast equivalent of standing on a street corner squinting at a map. It didn't help his nerves, and trying to nudge the lion for an answer why it was trying to place where it was when it knew where it was got a pile of non-Euclidian gibberish that made his head hurt.

He was mentally bonded to a non-Euclidian eldritch being from beyond normal reality that probably _could_ break a human mind from contact alone if it were careless, and now had a new set of lines to add to lists of Everything Wrong With Lovecraft's Ideas. For one, there was nothing in Lovecraft's xenophobic mess of racist metaphors that would have ever dreamed an Eldritch Being would be making weird mental 'fuck if I know/huh. weird' noises that Keith could still pick up on in spite of its attempts at conveying that it had some clue and this was something that should be happening. 

It fit in the Rube Goldberg machine, but even the Black Lion didn't fully understand the Rube Goldberg Machine or what all the pieces did. 

Whatever was going on, the lion _was_ confident that Pidge's assessment of it being safe to board the Altean ship was correct, and it was actual confidence, so he sighed and gave the order to split up and leave the lions to board.

..............................................................................

There were other Alteans.

There were other Alteans who were healthy and successful, who still had their own identity. She'd wondered about if they really were the last before, back with her father's hologram. The memory had thought it would've been difficult to truly wipe them out - they had been spread far across the universe, after all, and were very good at surviving and blending in when they needed to be. At the same time, he'd thought that the amount of careful secrecy it would take to survive would mean that they would be nearly impossible to find as long as the Galra Empire - as long as _Zarkon's_ Empire - still stood...

Nevermind that, after ten thousand years of needing to hide anything identifiably Altean, there would be little recognizable left of their culture and civilization.

In this alternate reality they had _lived_ , thrived like in the old days, and not only were they alive, they weren't reduced to hypothetical tatters hiding in fear. It was enough that she didn't want to pay attention to the little tells something was wrong. She knew Keith was uneasy, and rationally knew there would have to be a reason the alternate versions of Slav and "Shiro" were afraid of the Alteans, reasons she'd have to pay attention to eventually, but...

After waking up to everything gone, it was easier to put that off as something she'd deal with later. For now, she was willing to leave the timer ticking a little while, to tell herself that Keith was always suspicious and they didn't know what kind of people the two that had briefly attacked them were or why they'd be in conflict with Altea, to gloss over all the little things just to indulge in having a world where she wasn't one of the last two survivors of a civilization that was functionally dead and ashes. 

After Allura had done basic introductions of the others, Pidge and Hunk had gone to get a better look at the ship's cargo with Hira's science officer; Lance had opted to stay with them, while Keith followed on Allura's heels with Hira. It seemed to be taken in stride, Hira acting as though Keith were a subordinate officer of Allura's, and Keith seemed to be playing along with it, even if he was a mass of uneasy suspicion and restrained protective looming. 

She'd noticed that he hadn't wanted to split up the others, but that frustration had stalled in a lack of good arguments against it, so he'd opted for hovering and not leaving Allura alone with the other Altean officer; it was oddly endearing, and part of her knew it was probably a good idea even if she wanted to protest that there was no reason for concern.

Blue was watching over her shoulder, too, but was sticking with quiet curiosity for now.

Hira had checked in something on her wrist computer once they were in the hallway, and had cast a couple odd, pitying guarded glances back at Keith.

"...You're half-Galra." 

Keith blinked, blanching for a moment before he schooled it out of sight again. "Yeah?"

Hira shook her head, a hand raised for calm. "I've read the accounts of how the Galra treated half-Galra. I know how lucky you are to be with the Em-" - there was an awkard pause as Allura stiffened, half-turning to correct - "The Princess." Hira mouthed through the second title as if she weren't sure how to feel about it. 

Keith had his mouth half-open, the suspicious discomfort spiking up loud again. "...My family are allies of ours against Zarkon. Many of them lost their lives fighting him, and we wouldn't be here now without them."

Hira raised an eyebrow, a flicker of doubt, but nodded and didn't press it. Instead, she returned her attention to Allura. "How did you come to be here? You don't look a day over thirty decaphoebs, at _most_."

Allura had to stifle a snicker at the way Keith's suspicious cloud of gloom tripped over its own feet at Hira's estimate of her age; the amusement at the brief diversion wilted fast as soon as she went to answer and was reminded of the subject at hand. "...My father placed myself and his most trusted advisor into stasis with the Castle of Lions and the Black Lion, just before Altea was destroyed, then scattered the other lions in hiding to keep Zarkon from finding them. We were awakened when the Blue Lion brought the other new Paladins home to the Castle, ten thousand years later, to find the universe overtaken by the Galra Empire. We've been slowly turning the tide of that war since." She motioned the direction of the Commodore's shuttle. "My father had sent out the shuttle you came to investigate, and we picked up on its automated distress beacon; it's trapped in some kind of rift between our dimensions, which Voltron was able to safely navigate."

It was hardly the time for a longer explanation, and some of the confusion over how the distress beacon had gone unnoticed by the Galra was a subject for another time, if there ever was another time. Voltron was the only thing capable of navigating the passage, and Voltron had more than enough work for a few lifetimes in their universe.

Hira listened, considering it all carefully as they walked toward the bridge of her ship. "In our universe, Alfor had been in Galra territory after Daibazaal, tending to Zarkon personally. When Zarkon recovered and declared war on Altea, he had no chance to defend himself; Zarkon had him publicly executed." It was hard not to jump to moments of overactive imagination; what Keith had managed to share before of what had happened to her father in her timeline had been bad enough. She felt queasy, and it didn't register at first that Keith had not only resumed his suspicious unease, but had adjusted his pace to be walking a little closer on her heels, a shadow whose fingers had curled in a motion that would've extended claws on a full Galra. Hira didn't even seem to notice. "Queen Melenor took over piloting the Black Lion, with one of Alfor's most trusted Admirals piloting the Red; they drove back the Galra fleet from Altea, but when they pursued to put an end to it, Zarkon was able to sabotage Voltron somehow. It was destroyed in the fight that ensued, taking all of the last crew of Paladins with it." 

Voltron was not as invincible as she'd once believed when she was younger; that much they'd learned in their own early battles. It had taken a long fight for Shiro to manage to contest Zarkon's control of the Black Lion even after having entire phoebs to work on his bond with it. Not only would her mother and the others have been trying to adjust to new people in the lions, but there would've been no time to establish anything to push back against Zarkon's bond with it. 

"You took command of the Altean fleet, leading a string of successful assaults, and managed to corner and put an end to Zarkon and his upper command yourself. The rest of the Galra refused to lay down arms and continued his war; you succeeded at protecting Altea and many other peaceful worlds from them, and putting down several other threats, but lamented the tremendous loss of life on all sides, and set the new Altean Empire and its protectorates on the path to find ways to resolve conflicts without them ending in widespread bloodshed." 

There were a few beats where Keith's alarm and suspicion were so almost-audible that she was surprised he hadn't changed expression or the way he was shadowing her. It was far too easy to see why Hira's mention of the Galra in past-tense would rattle his nerves. All of the rest of it sounded entirely too reasonable; she could see it happening - much of it was what they were working on now.

But there was that past tense as one of the first solid nags to take hold; she _would_ have not believed there were Galra that would accept a peaceful solution to dismantling Zarkon's empire even a few phoebs ago, but now, with Keith, Kolivan, Antok, and the other Blades who had been fighting as hard as everyone else to put a stop to it - now the idea of treating all Galra as inherently dangerous and liable to turn on others was painful to remember.

She could believe she would have done it, without Kolivan's people and Keith ensuring that she was faced with proof of what they were, but it wasn't something she was proud of.

At least they'd been trying to avoid further unneeded bloodshed; that was something she clung to, still desperate to spend a little more time in the dream world where Altea had lived and grown and Zarkon's empire with its widespread slavery and genocide were distant myths. 

..................................................................................

They barely had to do anything when Voltron reappeared; whatever had been going on, the massive machine seemed to be already stunned and disoriented, tumbling with the sustained force of another impact and dragging sparkling trails out of the space in between realities. 

Snatching the comet Lotor was after was almost too easy, and they were gone before Voltron could react. 

It was a big victory for whatever Lotor was working on. He hadn't said what his end goal was - Haggar and her Druids were too everpresent of a presence, even one of them _knowing_ would put them and the plans at risk - but they all knew the general idea of it. He wanted to change the Empire, to break down the brutality and genocide, to make more of a place for the half-breeds and non-Galra. They'd all seen what happened to "idealists" who weren't willing to get their hands dirty, and they all knew that Lotor treated them well - better than anywhere else they'd be able to get.

Lotor needed this weird comet to make something to change the Empire, and after losing a number of his fringe Galra scouts and drones trying to get it, he'd gotten an old Altean distress beacon working to get Voltron to do it. 

Whatever his plans around Voltron were besides luring it around like a wild kargash chasing bait on a pole, he wasn't saying those either.

It wasn't exactly new to Axca to feel uneasy about Lotor sometimes, even if he had saved her life and given her a place where she wasn't just treated well, she had the ability to _do something_. It was something they all struggled with; a lifetime of being a Lesser Being left its marks, and bracing for the worst was a survival reflex when 'acts of kindness' were usually a lure to get you to drop your guard. 

It had grown easier to shush the unease over the years, every time there had been a situation that absolutely would have been a trap or something where they would've been treated as expendable fodder and Lotor had actually come through. She wasn't sure how to feel about the tiny conflicted nag now, or what to make of the Paladins.

_You really are just like the rest of them._

Lotor would've gotten her out when he had a chance. Not only was the scaultrite too important to his plans, it'd happened before; _they_ were too valuable, he'd always find some way to give them an escape or get them pulled out, directly or not. She'd actually expected to hear, when she returned, that he'd somehow orchestrated the two Paladins going after that specific Weblum, making it a surprise when he had one of his awkward moments re-orienting that she was back and not Still In Need Of Follow-Up. 

Fighting the Galra Empire head-on was a futile exercise - no matter how powerful the weapon, even if you took out the central command structure, there were so many petty territorial commanders and regional governors that it would split apart like a parasite egg sac into a hundred smaller horrors. It had to be remade, Voltron's war couldn't possibly succeed - 

But sometimes, now that Zarkon was on his deathbed and the upper command was growing restless and occasionally nervous, it was tempting to believe it could.

"Axca? Is everything alright?"

She startled, snapping back to the bridge; he'd stopped in concern, but Lotor's mood was still high from the victory. He'd been trying to figure out how to get at that meteor without Zarkon finding out for decaphoebs now.

"... It's fine. Just lost in thought for a minute." She wasn't even sure what was bothering her or why right now.

"If you have concerns, it would be better to hear them now than be caught off guard later." 

No, she did know part of what was bothering her - she didn't want to seriously fight the only other people that had actually treated her like an equal with respect. 

And she could ask. She might not get clear answers, but she'd get some kind of answers, although she reconsidered asking about it while the others were celebrating - Narti understood, but Ezor had just congratulated her and been proudly surprised about 'not thinking she had it in her' to 'pull one over on them like that'. 

Ezor had survived before by stealth, guile, and being cutthroat; Axca .... almost hadn't, but had been managing on stubbornness and digging in looking for something until Lotor found her. They were survivors, all of them, and knew the reality of what it took to make it that far too well to judge.

"Can I talk to you? In private?" She nodded away from the others; if she tried to ask about it here, she'd get the Peanut Gallery, and as much as Ezor and Zethrid were part of her family, there were times she really didn't need their input.

Lotor nodded with a more sober headtilt, and motioned for the door off the bridge, to one of the nearby side rooms.

She wasn't sure how to start at first, once the door closed in the other room; it was hard to find a start point that wouldn't sound like an accusation. Finally, she just went for a thread and grabbed it. "What _are_ we doing with Voltron?"

Lotor raised an eyebrow, taking a moment to think before he responded. "In what sense?"

Of course he wouldn't say anything without knowing what kind of situation he was dealing with. He was in a position of power compared to the rest of them and kept some distance, but he was just as much a survivor as the rest of them. 

"I don't know." She folded her arms unhappily, leaning on the wall. "Between what I encountered and what they've been doing, I'm not sure we're entirely on different sides."

He nodded slowly. "You're not wrong. Their methods so far are going to cause far more chaos before anything gets better, but they've also made it possible to accomplish in a few decaphoebs what I had expected to take _lifetimes_." 

Even as in control as he was, he was still 'young' enough and caught in a similar age-range enough that it could be easy to forget that his aging was artificially slowed to an extent that was hard to fathom - and then he said something like that. "So what is the plan? Are we fighting them?" She didn't quite want to admit that she didn't want to turn on someone who'd saved her life. "It seems counter-productive if you can secure solid control of the Empire to destroy something so many non-Galra are starting to look to as a symbol of hope."

He inhaled slowly, closing his eyes and leaning on the door. "It would be, and hypothetically, they would be useful allies against the witch and the worst parts of the upper command. _However_ ," he raised a hand, his tone going bitterly dry, "At current we are both under scrutiny as her temporary patch to maintain stability in my father's absence, and need to get as much of the Galran hierarchy behind us as possible to make any future attempts at gaining control possible. Any gesture of contact or even a lack of hostility would have Haggar crawling down our throats and the upper command ready to slaughter us for treating with 'the enemy'." 

They had more freedom of movement, but they were far from out of danger. "So we're fighting them."

"Until we have enough of a power base and enough other things in place to draw down the conflict. Considering their agenda, I am sure that I can gain their support later, more easily than that of the upper command." He rolled his eyes with a tired look to the ceiling. "There are plenty of places where their intervention would be useful to our plans until then; maintaining enough hostility to keep the Empire pacified merely requires ... less direct methods of gaining their cooperation."

The Altean beacon was the most obvious incident, but it was a very easy general plan to follow - bait them where he wanted them, and get their attention on whatever he needed them to destroy, distract, or soften up. 

If they really were committed to diplomacy and mercy the way the Red Paladin had framed it, then if they were lucky they wouldn't even need to lie to explain their actions here - 'if we tried to talk to you they would have killed us' was clear enough. 

"There was more on your mind than that?" He was giving her one of his careful, gauging looks, and she blanched, needing a second to catch her composure.

"It - I just." She stood straighter, adjusting her armor. "Right now I don't have much reason to fight them, personally, and I'd rather not kill someone who saved my life when they had every reason as far as they knew to see me as a threat." 

"Ah." Lotor nodded with a faint smile. "It is one of the tragedies of how twisted the universe has become that most would see such loyalty as a weakness to take advantage of." He stepped away from the door, standing up. "I have no plans of doing any lasting harm to them, just making them believe it's a possibility - and as sturdy as the lions are, I doubt we need to worry about holding back with them. Even if the current team is still learning the ropes, this is something that survived a direct hit from the Komar and was back to full strength within a decaphoeb." 

She let out a breath, shoulders sagging with a nod. They probably could _hurt_ the Paladins some, but he had a point - even if they were seriously trying, the lions and their pilots had already survived worse.

"I understand. Thank you, sir." 

He smiled, tapping the button by the side of the door to open it. "Good. Let's get back to enjoying our victory, shall we?"

****************************************

The hangars were spread out; it was impossible to meet all the lions as they landed, and nobody was really surprised that Coran had opted for Blue's hangar first, to be waiting for Allura after they'd regained their footing enough to separate Voltron and return.

Allura's nerves were still buzzing, edges of vertigo coming and going. The shot from the Altean ship as they'd left the mirror dimension had come just late enough to interact with the passage through the rift, and Blue seemed a little out of it herself. Not injured, exactly, but dazed and loopy, a state that was also affecting Allura, and all of the others if she'd picked up on things correctly. 

She stumbled as she was coming off Blue's ramp, Coran darting in to catch her; the mice were on his shoulder, all scrambling to jump over to her as soon as he was close enough with a chorus of worry and fussing in her head.

She could have regained her feet.

She could have stood straight up and had a normal conversation.

Coran was there, and the reality of everything in the other universe and what it _meant_ came crashing in, and she clung to him, burying her face in his shoulder.

He hugged her tighter, rubbing her shoulders in back, and she heard a faint little more worried noise. "Princess? ...Are you alright?"

A couple muffled sobs slipped out; it was almost _worse_ than Zarkon's Empire, so soaked in self-righteousness and just as severe in genocide and punishment, with more success finding ways to turn slaves into subservient shells - 

And some version of _her_ had started it. 

"No." 

Coran wasn't letting go, but was shifting, trying to see if she was injured, while the mice were just burrowing into her collar to nuzzle against her. 

"I'm - I'm not _hurt_ , just...." Her voice faltered, and she buried her face back in his shoulder.

"What happened?" It was almost a whisper.

She shook her head, smearing tears on his shirt. "Not. Not yet."

Coran nodded, and stayed firm, holding her.

The doors opened, and then didn't get enough time to close; Lance and Keith had almost run into each other skidding into the room, with Pidge and Hunk not far behind, the whole collection piling in with an overlapping chorus of "PRINCESS" and "ALLURA". 

Coran cautiously shifted, letting her stumble to her feet as she pulled away to turn to them. The disorganized pile didn't stop, clustering around her with hands from every direction almost steadying her or just trying to tug for contact, a wall of concern with all of them _knowing_ it'd hit her the hardest. 

She stopped putting as much effort into keeping her feet, although she did lean more toward Lance and Hunk; it didn't feel right to try and lean on Keith, after how she'd treated him not that long ago and hearing what her other self had done. He didn't try to worm in, but there was a spike of more worried alarm and he gave her other shoulder a squeeze while Lance made a little noise of confusion and ended up helping Hunk with a support-hug. Pidge, on the other hand, did worm in between them to hug her waist, and the mice squirmed around to shift in her collar and the upper part of her shirt to position themselves better with the larger humans involved. 

"Hey. It's okay - it wasn't you." There wasn't a trace of Lance's flirting attempts; he was just hugging as tight as he could without competing with Pidge and Hunk, part of a protective wall. 

She shook her head, clinging back to all of them as best as she could manage. "It - It made _sense_ , I would have, I almost - you all saw -" She glanced over at Keith, who still had his hand on her shoulder hovering close, with sickened guilt; she knew how she'd treated him entirely too recently. She had come _far_ too close to the bloody, avenging empress.

Keith frowned, glaring at her as if it could scare off the guilt, and there was a tiny warning growl, a noise that was almost comically thin and reedy compared to a full Galra. A choked half-laugh intruded at the sound, for only a moment. 

Coran was hovering over Lance and Hunk's shoulders, peering in worried and as close as he could get without wedging in; there were already little inquiring squeaks of confusion and alarm from the mice, jumbled not-quite-sentences of 'what happened' and 'where were you'.

"You _stopped_ , you knew better. You stopped _them_ from getting what they wanted." Keith squeezed her shoulder again.

He'd forgiven her, completely, as if it'd never happened, and she wasn't sure _how_ or even if he should have. She'd never really had a chance to fully address it besides the apology before everything went to Hell and a little bit in the fallout and aftermath, with fifty other things distracting, and she'd spent half a phoeb or more treating him like the enemy while he was still risking his life as much or more than anyone else there. 

Blue nudged at her, a gentle push towards all of them, the other Paladins, Coran, and the mice, a bat at the guilt and the knot of not feeling like she'd _earned_ this kind of regard from any of them, especially Keith.

Blue was sure she would at least try to do the same for any of them, even if she wasn't always sure how, and thought the way she was holding herself to a higher standard was silly - but she was the Princess, she had grown up with the lions being taught all of this, she _should_ be held to a higher standard.

The lion huffed in the back of her head, and pushed her at all of them again. 

***********************************

After the basic "debriefing" - with their group, more of a chaotic mess of people trying to narrate what happened as much as they felt up to saying for what was important right then, which was everyone coming back OK and that the thing Lotor had made off with was another trans-reality comet like the one Voltron had been made from - Coran ducked out. The paladins all seemed a bit shaken, but were mostly going back to their normal routines.

He didn't think 'normal routine' would last long, and made straight for the medbay, updating the Castle's records of the biosignature and physiology sensors from the armor. 

He'd seen Voltron go through a rift like that once before, and while most of the Paladins who'd stayed in Voltron had come out basically fine, he didn't want to take any chances. 

It was easily visible where they'd passed through the rift. Voltron did offer some protection from the exposure, but the space in between realities was so much raw energy that it flooded in, filtered through the Lions in a burst both times they'd passed through. Some of it still lingered, in both the lions and their systems. 

The Castle's database had some documentation of Quintessence exposure, but not much, and even less of it well catalogued and researched; they'd been stealing files here and there from the Empire, but that was dependent on sorting, and Pidge's priorities ran towards tactical information and information on prisoners - either immediately necessary or personal. Medical implications and long term effects were completely lacking.

Fortunately, thanks to Kolivan arranging contact to gauge the aftermath of the Paladins getting hit by the Komar, he had someone he could call to shake - and possibly badger into coming to the Castle to help, depending on how things looked. 

Even with it flagged urgent, it took a couple attempts to get a response from the Blade medic, the tall scaled Galra squinting at the screen, groggy and with his ridge of a mane sticking out every which way. 

"What's the emergency?"

"Torak! I need some advice on... a situation involving ridiculous amounts of quintessence exposure in dramatic circumstances." 

Torak shifted his jaw. "Is anyone dying right now?" 

"Not right now, but after the last time something like this happened, if there's any unpleasant implications, I want to get started dealing with it as soon as possible." 

Torak narrowed his eyes, one pointed ear lowering, but after a couple ticks, decided not to argue. "Alright, what happened?"

The Blade would be getting everything they could tell about what happened anyway, and were their closest allies in this conflict; he didn't think twice about explaining it. "We found one of Alfor's research shuttles caught in a rift after a mishap transporting a trans-reality comet, half-in and half-out of reality; Voltron went through the rift and back, trying to investigate, and took a hit from some kind of weaponry while returning. Then they were ambushed by Lotor, who stole the comet."

Another few ticks passed. Torak blinked twice. "They what with a what through what?"

Coran sighed. As frustrating as it was to have to stop and go into more detail instead of pressing onto the part where he'd get help telling how worried he should be about the Paladins, and it wasn't like the Blade had much information on where Voltron came from or what had happened. "Apparently Alfor found signs of another trans-reality comet, like the one he used to create Voltron - the one that created the rift on Daibazaal. He'd sent out one of his research teams to retrieve it, but they never returned. We picked up on an automated distress beacon and found half of the ship sticking through a rift very like the one that _had_ existed on Daibazaal. Voltron went out to investigate and passed through the rift, then returned with the comet, but something on the other side fired on them as they were passing through it, and then Lotor took advantage of it to grab the comet and run."

"...They went through a Rift."

"Yes."

"A rift like the one that raw Quintessence was discovered from." 

"Yes." 

"And got shot while passing through it." Torak was doing an amazing job of keeping a level, neutral, calm tone and expression, but Coran suspected it had more to do with being half-awake and still trying to process everything Coran had just dumped on him than any actual reaction. 

"Mm-hmm."

Torak inhaled deeply, closing his eyes, scaled brows knitting together with a faint, deep-register rusty whine of frustration. "Send me the biometric data."

Coran pulled up the files, sending as much as he could manage for the Paladins, with the before readings for comparison; Torak already had previous records, thanks to checking over everything after the Komar. 

There were a few minutes of relative silence with the lights of multiple screens flickering as the Blade went over everything. Coran tried to stay still and hold in the urge to start asking questions; the man needed time to work, and pestering him while he was trying to concentrate wouldn't help get answers. 

Alfor and the others had recovered without more than minor side effects, easily missed among everything else going on, but they also hadn't gotten shot or attacked while passing through it. Coran understood the readings enough to know that the shot did cause some fluctuations in the lion's shielding and ability to control internal energy flow, but medical science was not his area of expertise, and the nuance of how quintessence interacted with living things at those concentrations was something not even the previous lead medic of the Castle would've known. 

The Blade had plenty of data and experience, between cribbing the Empire's research and their own work over the years. 

It didn't help Coran's nerves that Torak was periodically tilting his head, squinting at different things thoughtfully, and making quiet little considering noises. 

It was a few doboshes before Torak looked up from going over the data, although it felt like a few vargas. "Well, for one, the long term effects of their connections to the lions make it difficult at best to gauge other interruptions, since their energetic systems are gradually changing with the controlled introduction of other energy and other patterns." 

Coran had heard this preface before.

"The only data we have for a baseline normal on humans is three bits of intake records from the Empire, and you have more background data on Alteans than we do." 

Allura was another monkey wrench in their data. 

"That said, the spikes in ambient quintessence for passing through the rift were very brief, and the lions buffered out almost all of it, including soaking the brunt of the reaction between the rift's energy and the shot that hit them; there shouldn't be anything worse than difficulty sleeping and slightly amplified emotional reactions for a few quintants." Torak dismissed the extra screens.

"So they're fine? You're sure about that?" It was good news, but Coran was bracing for some other surprise to pop out, other bad news besides Lotor making off with the comet.

Torak nodded. "Their current biosignature readings are elevated compared to what they were before entering the rift, but the spike was filtered through the lions, so it shouldn't disrupt or alter anything beyond what effects the lions already have on them." He shrugged, scrunching his face. "You really need to find an actual crew medic." 

Coran sighed; the lions really were a miracle. "I know, I know. It's harder than it sounds, even with the Coalition - just about everyone that might be qualified that we'd trust has their hands more than full with all sorts of other things blowing up where they live. Maybe when we have some more breathing room or something, we'll trip over some trustworthy medic that's willing to help and doesn't end up lost in a spatial distortion saving us from one of the Empire's monsters." 

He earned a brief snort for that one. "He probably would have just volunteered and moved in, too, even though Kolivan would've wanted him pulled back to base if anything."

"I would've welcomed the help, even if Allura still needed some time to recover enough for it. It's hard on the nerves, trying to keep all of them together when the most I ever did was field first aid and hovering about whenever the old Paladins did something stupid and got themselves landed in medbay. If the Castle didn't know what it was doing for most of it..." 

Torak made a quiet acknowledging noise. "I'd say we'd send someone to help once we can afford to spare someone, but the way things are going, we're more overworked than ever keeping our own people together - you'd have more luck looking for Altean genius doctors in stasis than waiting for us. But, you're welcome to send messages for anything you need and I'll get back to you as fast as I can, stars willing that we aren't dealing with major emergencies at the same time." 

"I appreciate the help - I mean it. You take care of yourself and don't go chasing yalmors, alright?"

The Blade shook his head with a half-laugh. "I barely get the time to chase sleep here. Speaking of, if there's nothing else you needed, I'm going to get back to that." He gave Coran a vague half-salute; Coran returned it as the screen flickered off. 

His main interface for his personal computer still had the list of everything needing maintenance, prioritized by how important it was and how likely it was to impact other systems, a ten thousand year backlog he was still slowly chipping at with the inevitable new additions of shield generators needing checks and minor things out of place whenever there was an altercation. He wanted to check on Allura, but she'd had the others with her, and had been doing the quiet dodgy bit she did when she needed space to process; hovering would only make her angry and more stubborn about not talking about whatever it was.

At least there was no shortage of work to distract himself with while he waited for that. 

************************************

She'd found an old corner of the Castle outside of the high-traffic areas to hole up for a while with the mice; it had been several vargas of wordvomiting at them, rambling through everything about the other reality and how much it had found her own fears - that she wasn't the kind of hero her father was, that she didn't know what she was doing, how close she'd come before to causing everything to go wrong, how easy it would've been and could still be to become The Empress despite the assurances that she wasn't the same person.

Other realities didn't necessarily mean 'different person' exactly; she could easily see the Slav they knew being more like the Slav they'd met, if he'd had to do more front-lines fighting and hadn't been through phoebs or more of torture. 

And every time Slav in either reality had ever gone on tangents about different realities, it was always in probabilities; more likely, less likely, mathematical patterns to how events could fork from the same basic set of factors. 

The Empress that had founded the Altean empire in the other reality wasn't a different person, and that was the problem. The mice helped, some, propping things in here and there; Plachu pointing out that she wasn't the only one who made mistakes, Platt going over how they'd always managed to salvage things so far, Chuchule reminding her that she was doing her best and had always tried to correct things when she realized she was making a mistake like her father and mother had taught her. 

It took some of the edge off, but didn't really banish any of the tangle of fears and insecurities.

She wasn't feeling up to being around the others when she finally headed back, but Plachu and Chulatt had tag-teamed, reminding her that she was a Paladin now and they still had plenty to be doing, and that Coran at least deserved an explanation of what had happened in the other universe, which the other Paladins probably wouldn't get into without her. 

He did deserve to know, as awful as it was.

Chulatt stayed on her shoulder, the other three scattering, to go check on everyone else. She could still feel about where they were, even if it took effort to communicate anything when they weren't in the same room. 

She found Coran in the engine room with an entire assembly half taken apart, going over it meticulously; the Castle did need maintenance beyond its own self-repair systems, but she suspected this was more a case of finding things to keep busy with to defray nerves than actually necessary repairs. It only took him a tick or two to realize she was there, and the tools and parts were dropped and forgotten instantly.

"Princess! Is everything alright?" 

She shrank in the doorway, fidgeting with the hems of her sleeves. "...No." She wanted to just hide from everything for a while, until she felt less like a sham that had somehow fooled everyone, but she knew she couldn't get away with that. "But I ... need to tell you what happened - you deserve to know." 

She picked a careful path through the mess of tools and parts, carefully settling her skirt around her on the ground by where he was sitting, attention focused on her completely with pent-up worry, legs crossed and hands folded in his lap.

"That strange rift... it - the other half of the shuttle was in another reality, parallel to this one. None of the crew had survived, but - people from the other side had found it as well."

It was hard to continue - as if explaining it to Coran, sharing this with someone outside of that nightmare and having it spoken out loud, would make it real and end any possibility she might wake up to find it'd been a horrible dream. Finding a place to even start was worse.

"There were - other versions of ... Slav, and a man who looked just like Shiro but introduced himself as Sven. They recognized our armor as Altean and attacked us, until we all realized that we were from different realities - and then they fled because an Altean ship was approaching, and warned us that we should do the same." 

Coran frowned faintly, nodding. 

"They came on board - two Alteans with a handful of gladiators and ... someone silent, from a species I did not recognize. They called me Empress, and accepted us immediately; Pidge and Hunk stayed with the scientist, to investigate the shuttle's cargo, while Keith and I walked with the General. She was curious about our reality, and told us some of the history of theirs -"

She paused, worrying along the seams of her skirt; Coran had gone solemn, the kind of old and worn that she rarely saw him show. 

"It... Father hadn't stayed on Altea, he'd been trying to save Zarkon - he was killed in Galra space, and Mother tried to fight Zarkon with Voltron. They saved Altea, but - everyone died, and I..." She swallowed, looking away. "I led the fight and managed to kill Zarkon, and ... at some point, Altea wiped out the Galra." Hira had 'heard stories', but hadn't even recognized Keith's lapses into Galra body language, and only ever mentioned them in past-tense. It was possible some had survived, but she wasn't sure if lobotomized remnant puppets could be called 'surviving'. "Altea became the Empire that conquered the universe, in the name of ending all wars and petty conflicts, and .... they had developed ways to strip those who would not surrender of all free will and thought, keeping them as slaves."

She looked up just enough to check Coran's reaction; he had gone distant, but was still listening, quiet and subdued, without any of the shock or disbelief she'd been expecting. 

"Coran, that shuttle - what my father had sent Commodore Trayling to collect in secrecy - it... it was another comet. A trans-reality comet, like the one Voltron was made from. They wanted to use it to make ships they could use to 'spread peace' to other realities, and we only managed to get to the lions to take it from them with Sven and Slav's help - the Alteans turned on us as soon as they realized how horrified we were by what they'd done to other civilizations. They were the ones who had shot at us as we were passing through the rift back to this reality. And... when Hira said what had happened, what I had done and why, it - it all made sense. It was things I would have done, particularly without Keith or Kolivan to remind me that the Galra were other _people_ , no matter how misguided and cruel many of them had become." She rolled the fabric of her skirt around her hands, balling them up in the material. "I will never question the wisdom of Father putting me to sleep for all those years again, having seen what I did there."

Coran shook his head, putting a hand out to rest on her knee for a moment. "All he was thinking was protecting you. He really did want to come back for you, even if we all knew it was unlikely, and ..." Coran looked down. "He had faith that if he failed, you and the lions would be able to set things right." 

"That's the _problem_ , Coran. Father had faith in me setting all of this right, and if he hadn't put me to sleep, I would have been the one turning the universe into a nightmare rather than Zarkon. Everyone here is looking to me to lead for gathering a new Coalition and beating back the Empire, and I haven't the slightest idea what I'm doing most days besides - floundering about for anything that looks like it might accomplish something. I've already almost caused a disaster, insisting on going on that mission and nearly handing Voltron to Zarkon; Ulaz was right that we all would have been doomed had his comrade not been there to provide an escape route, and had I been more stubborn about my mistrust of the Blade of Marmora..."

Coran shook his head with a very tired, thin, faint and sad chuckle. "You know you sound like your father when he was your age, the first time he actually said anything honest about why he was running away from responsibilities so hard." 

She blinked, staring at him as if he'd grown a second head. Nothing about that sentence was connecting properly. "...He what?"

"Was a mess when he was your age. There was so much going on, with the wars and other conflicts, that he was terrified he'd make a mistake and everything would fall apart, so he was spending all his time sneaking out to poke weird ruins or flirt or hang around smugglers and pirates. Of course, Trigel once told us that her commander and mentor decided he was the more dangerous of the candidates for the King's throne, purely because of the sort of things he was pulling off to _avoid_ responsibility - they were terrified of what he'd be capable of when he was serious." He smiled thin at her dumbfounded expression. "How did you _think_ I got so familiar with Unilu swap stations and underworld ports?" 

She'd heard more than a few 'funny stories' about things the old Paladins, her father included, had gotten into and occasional dumb things they'd done, but it was hard to go from 'the time everyone, the Queen included, had a betting pool on when he'd realized he'd accidentally invoked a first-contact-civilization's courtship customs' to picturing her father floundering around like some of them did, nevermind her father panicking about not being able to handle things and running away to gamble with pirates. 

"It took him a while to find his confidence, and he wasn't alone for any of the really important things." 

As encouraging as that was - even if she doubted he'd ever been half that much of a train wreck - it left the larger part of the problem untouched. "Did he ever hit a point where he could've lapsed into leading a war of genocide?" She forced it out, bitterly.

"You mean fighting civilizations where the leaders had warped the culture horribly, so that it's a bloody mess to figure out how to stop them without going too far?" Coran gave a grim shrug. "That came up. Never quite on this scale, but to a few horrifying extents before." 

As far as she knew, there were a good handful of groups that'd been added to the old Coalition treaties over the years that had started out hostile, and times where there were thorny tangles de-escalating existing old conflicts and pervasive prejudices. 

"You sorted it out fine already; best not to get all eaten up by what-if when you've already gotten past it, eh?" He stood up, offering her a hand. "I know your father would be proud of you - I am." 

**************************

It was a bit later when she wandered up to what the others had started calling the "observation" deck - the broad, open lounge with an entire side of the room converted into holo-screens for different kinds of scenery. She wasn't sure if they even realized that some of the odd recesses had once been planters for living greenery from twelve different worlds, and wasn't sure how to feel about growing used to seeing it barren. 

The lights and screens came on as she entered, loading the last environment they'd been showing - a broad expanse of ocean with a beach of multicolored sand, colorful formations of gigantic corals and shell growing around it, partly carved out to have tunnels and rooms.

It took a couple beats to place why that would be a scene in use; she had to wonder if Lance had just randomly settled on this particular beach while looking through beach scenes in a fit of homesickness, or if he'd gone looking for scenery from Nalquod. 

It was an idle ponder for another time, if she remembered.

"...Show me home." 

The computer chirped acknowledgment, then the beach vanished, replaced by a courtyard of white and silver spires with creeping flowers growing up the walls, arcing trees and foliage with layers of different blooms making a patterned set of open spaces. 

It was usually comforting, but right now it felt more like a punch in the gut, a reminder of everything that'd been lost even if she was fighting with new bursts of homesickness.

"...From orbit." 

It shifted to the view from one of the outer satellite stations, blue, green, white and gold below with the silver arcs of orbital arcologies and mirror-systems, blue-white lines and sigils curling around the planet in wards and protections. 

There had been times she'd gotten to watch this same view from the Castle bridge's viewscreens; she settled in one of the couches, knees drawn up to her chest, letting her mind drift.

It was soothing for a dobosh or two, then she caught herself tracing the changes in the projection Hira had shown her - another layer of wards, extensions on the orbital arcologies, another arc of silver further out. 

Altea had lived in the other universe, but at a price that would never be worth it. 

"End simulation." 

The deck went dark, silent enough for the background hum of the Castle to slowly grow deafening; neither of her usual comforts were helping at all, but she knew the dead silence wasn't going to help either.

"....Show me Daibazaal."

After a couple ticks to settle on a specific projection, the holoprojectors came back on, to the view from one of the ledges outside the main palace. Mottled black and red stone curved out as if continuing off the floor, dropping off in an overhang that looked out over sweeps of red, black, pale lavender and orange-gold; the deep burgundy spires of the old palace rose off to the side, the platform that the Black Lion once roosted on sitting empty. The sky was red with everpresent dust, tones sounding from wind sweeping across holes and through gaps as if the entire area were some abandoned music instrument mixed with the occasional calls of wildlife. 

It wasn't comforting, but it was a less painful kind of dredging up ghosts right now. Somehow. It was the first time she'd even really thought about the landscapes of the old Galra homeworld since waking up without feeling queasy, and while there was still an unease to it, it was more complicated now.

She knew the history was complicated. There was a faction of Galra that had pledged loyalty to one of her ancestors, and over time Altea had its own Galran population among other non-Altean species that had immigrated. The relationship with Daibazaal had been back and forth, with some occasions of trade and tentative alliance, some open wars, and long periods of unease; before the Old Paladins, it had been uneasy with threats of sparking into another open war. 

The official story of how Zarkon and Alfor had met was not entirely true; they'd both made jokes in private occasionally about Alfor sneaking in for visits in secret long before they clonked heads rescuing survivors from a raided ship. 

All the conflicts had been long settled in their part of space by the time she was born; before Zarkon had turned on them, the idea of war with the Galra was blocks of text in the history of their respective peoples and an occasional small conflict with a renegade faction Zarkon hadn't brought in line yet. She'd had Galran childhood friends.

They'd had picnics on this ledge, her family and the other old Paladins.

The door opening behind her jarred her out of her daze, and she sat up straight, turning on the couch sharply to find Keith standing in the door in one of his awkward pauses, mouth half open and staring blankly at her like a drone that'd just had a critical failure reloading its operating system. 

"...Sorry. I can go if you don't want-" He made a couple helpless, confused hand gestures at her and the scenery; he was trying to play off staring at the landscape in more blankly curious confusion, but failing at it. "Nobody had seen you in a while, so-"

Plachu peered around his collar. "So I thought you'd spent enough time moping and went to find someone." 

She raised an eyebrow at the mouse; she got along with Keith well enough, and there were some things he understood better than the others, but he was the last one she'd think of for Talking About Feelings. "Really."

Keith flinched, and she shook her head fast, pinching the bridge of her nose. 

"Not you. I was talking to Plachu." 

"Oh." He relaxed, still dumbfounded.

Plachu rolled his eyes. "Lance and Pidge were on level 30 of their game and didn't even notice me, Hunk didn't think he'd be able to help, and Chulatt said you'd already talked to Coran for a while. Besides, there's stuff you said you needed to talk to him about _phoebs_ ago, and he's supposed to be learning how to do the Black Paladin thing looking out for people anyway." 

Keith was watching Plachu sideways, more awkwardly confused.

She sighed, scowling at the mouse. "Ugh, fine." 

Keith shifted weight back toward the door. "...I - can go if you really wanted to be alone."

"It's not - you're fine, it isn't you." She shot Plachu a glare. "I am just beginning to reconsider that _nickname_ you gave him." 

Plachu stuck his tongue out at her, unrepentant, and retreated into Keith's collar. 

She shook her head, settling back onto the couch, waving for Keith to come in. 

Keith slunk over, sliding down into the curved couch a little out of arm's reach, trying to find some direction to look that wasn't awkward and failing. The easiest direction he had was off toward the holoprojector's landscape, which led to him nodding to it as his best attempt at some kind of conversation.

"I... don't think I've seen this before. Where is it?"

It figured he'd walk in for this. "...It. _Was_ Daibazaal - the old Galran homeworld." 

He froze for a moment, then stared off into the landscape, going quiet. It was an odd kind of lost pause.

"...I lived out in a desert on Earth... Shiro and I used to go out racing hoverbikes in the canyons." 

She'd seen pictures of the area, in the massive dump folder all of their backups of their personal devices had ended up in after Sendak's crystal had invaded the Castle's computer. The directory had been corrupted, turning it into a large mess with no way to tell whose was which, but after seeing Keith in quiet moments with a slightly battered Earth camera and the time he'd shown her Blaytz's tomb, she'd guessed a good chunk of the better photos of landscapes and wildlife were his. She nodded quietly. "Large parts of it were ... harsh, carved out and shifting occasionally between volcanic events, erosion from occasional storms and underground waterways, and various tunneling creatures - there was as much life underground as on the surface, more in some areas. The Imperial palace was one of the oldest structures as substantial on the surface as it was beneath." 

It was easier, to keep the distance of tour-guide history book comments, instead of how they'd had picnics on this ledge, she'd scraped her elbows climbing that overhang, watched a sandstorm howl out that window, run off and turned the search for her into a game of hide and seek in the tunnels under the palace and learned that her father knew them almost better than Zarkon himself did. 

Keith was watching her sideways, worried but uncertain; Plachu popped his head up out of Keith's collar, shooting her a pointed look. 

There were things she'd meant to say phoebs ago, "when they came back from the fight with Zarkon", that had gotten lost in the chaos and were more relevant than ever after what she'd seen in that other universe. 

"...I - never did get to properly apologize for my behavior, before." 

Keith froze, blinking wide and tilting his head, caught utterly flat-footed and without a clue how to react. He made a few fumbling attempts at finding words before finally achieving the articulate statement of "....Huh?", mouth hanging open. Plachu burrowed back into his collar, his work for the moment done.

"I treated you horribly, _after_ you'd done as much or more than anyone else to prove yourself, and there was no excuse for my behavior." 

He closed his mouth, hunching his shoulders. "...It's okay, really. You already apologized once, and you'd lost everything to the Galra." He gave a helpless shrug.

"No, it's not 'okay'." She still wasn't sure how it worked - that the most suspicious and temperamental of the Paladins had just rolled over and accepted her mistreating him like that all along. "Whatever my reasons might have been, I was - taking out my own injuries and fears on innocent people, friends and allies. You had already more than proven yourself, and all I could see was another Galra." 

Keith went quiet, leaning with his elbows propped on his knees, head ducked down, not quite looking at her. "... You'd been hurt by people you'd trusted, and you were trying to protect yourself. It's... Not easy to get over that." 

It was tentative and quiet and slightly evasive, but it felt more telling about _him_ than anything he'd ever said, a layer of guard dropped that she wasn't sure any of them but Shiro had ever seen - 

No, she'd seen a flicker of it, back when she'd pinned him to the wall, but she'd been too much of a mess of grief and hurt to do anything at the time but remove herself so she didn't make it worse.

"...I was." It was harder to get out than she'd expected. "But... all I saw was Zarkon and some of the others, and ... you're nothing like them." 

He looked up, catching her with a weary, worn-through stare that made him look ten times older than he was. "You sure about that?" 

Allura blanched, leaning back in her seat. "...Zarkon is - a _monster_ who's burned most of the universe!"

Keith frowned, and pointedly looked between her and the old Palace. "But he wasn't always."

Allura shook her head sharply; he wasn't perfect, but it was distressing to hear him frame himself with that horrible of a comparison. "You would never have done what he's done." 

Keith sighed, leaning his head lopsided with a half eyeroll to the ceiling. "So. How much of this is about the Empress?"

She opened her mouth, hand raised, stared, and closed her mouth with a tiny awkward noise, not sure how this had just turned around on her. Keith was sitting a little straighter, and she would have dearly loved him going back to the awkward distracted attention bit he was doing a few doboshes ago.

"No, I - I mean -" Plachu peering out of his collar with a warning glare only made it worse. Keith she might be able to throw off or get away from, but Plachu would either start arguing with her until she slipped and said something in front of Keith, or never let her hear the end of it. She slumped back against the couch, folding her arms and curling her legs up on the couch. "...It... definitely didn't help." 

Keith raised an eyebrow, only making a faint motion that he was waiting for her.

She sighed. "...It... wasn't strange enough. I could have - almost _did_ \- go that route in _our_ reality, had you and - Kolivan and Antok and the others not made sure I remembered that Galra were _people_ , not just monsters like Zarkon... everyone keeps telling me that she isn't me, I'm not her, but - I know that I _could have been_ , that - what made the difference between their reality and ours was... me." 

Keith stayed quiet, but there was a small, half-shrug. "Yeah. I know. Believe me, I know." It was the first time she'd actually heard any tone of frustration from him about her previous behavior, and she flinched, shrinking in the couch. 

"... And everyone is still looking to me to help lead all of this, and - be a Paladin."

"Yep." It was just as matter of fact as the last statement had been. "You're good at it, and you know what you're doing more than any of the rest of us." 

She blinked, staring at him, trying to fit the pieces together. "...And you're... comfortable with that, knowing how easily I could have been a genocidal tyrant." 

He made a noncommittal noise and shrugged again, shifting to lean back on the couch and drape one arm up over it. "And I've got a lot in common with Zarkon - both Red and Black have told me that." 

All she could manage there was a brief noise of confusion; it wasn't a connection she was making very well, and she didn't really want to revisit the very paranoia that had caused the other reality. 

Keith barely seemed to notice, watching the projection of Daibazaal's landscape, bits of reddish dust on the wind curling around the palace. "I think even Zarkon noticed it, when I was fighting him. I couldn't figure out why the lions were so okay with me when they were the ones pointing it out, but... I know there were times Red practically hit me upside the head pretty hard because I was starting to be stupid the way he got, and Black's already pulled a couple tests to see which way I'd go."

She still wanted to argue that he wasn't like Zarkon at all; Keith was stubborn and had a temper, sure, but was one of the most self-sacrificing people she knew. It just didn't quite manage to come out, because as much as she recoiled from the comparison, she was still reeling from everybody telling her that she wasn't like the Empress at all. "And you've passed, I'm sure." 

The Black Lion wasn't balking at working with him, and she had her own senses to judge by. She'd known they were all interconnected, but hadn't had a concept what that truly meant until the first time she'd stepped into Blue's cockpit as a Paladin. Even before they'd managed to pull together as Voltron, the sheer amount of _awareness_ had been almost disorienting. She had senses as clear as any royal Altean, she could feel presences easily enough and pick up on things if she was focusing and paying attention, but there was a monumental difference between the feeling of a Person and a vague general sense of their state, and having connections sharing bits of being with emotions and little occasional thought-fragments and images echoing around. It was enough to be overwhelming, and she still was fumbling between keeping some shielding up for privacy's sake and allowing the connections to be clear enough to _work_. 

Keith had been painful to watch, being able to feel all the grief and pain and panic that underneath his bristling and snapping. 

It was _n't_ like Zarkon.

She started at the Blue Lion's quiet intrusion, a weary, tired layer sapping her certainty that Keith had nothing in common with Zarkon. 

"Yeah... but not because I wasn't like him." Keith leaned his head back, closing his eyes. Blue was nudging her to pay attention, to stop thinking and _feel_ what was around her. 

The horrified recoil at the comparison between Keith and Zarkon was almost entirely hers. Plachu didn't have much of a strong opinion either way, having only vague memories of Zarkon from before everything had gone wrong and he'd gotten enough power leaked in from her, the Castle, and the Lion over the eons to end up something More. Blue agreed with her siblings that Keith was very like Zarkon, in a way that was steeped in grief.

Keith wasn't... comfortable with it, exactly, but there was acceptance; it wasn't even self-deprecating acceptance or something that felt entirely negative, just something that _was_.

"...What was it, then?" 

There was only so much she could tell from what she could feel.

"It.... was things like trusting that the Black Lion wanted to help Shiro and knows what it's doing even though what it said wasn't any of the answers I wanted." He shifted down in the couch, staring off distantly with a faint, warped almost-laugh. "Because Zarkon wasn't a monster. He was a person, and something happened where he didn't trust the lion and didn't trust the people he should've, and ... if he had just done things a little differently, none of it would've happened, and he would've gone on being the Black Paladin and the legendary hero." Keith shifted, watching the projection again, more self-conscious. 

There was something bitter and awful in the back of her mouth, and she just wanted to shrink back into the couch until there was nothing there, but Blue was softly curling in the back of her mind to stay, stay and listen, stay and not be alone, stay and let herself feel and stop pretending she wasn't hurt, even though it still felt like there was so much there that if she let any of it out she'd drown in it. 

They'd had picnics on this ledge, the real one, once. 

She knew where the abyss was, the chasm they were trying to pull their reality out of, the one that had devoured her in the other reality. It was in the space between her godfather and her father's murderer, between saving the Balmera and wiping out the Galra.

The Black Paladin and the Emperor. She wanted only one of them to be real, the other a long-con they'd all fallen for, and since the Emperor was irrefutable, that left Zarkon's presence in her life before to be a lie.

The Princess and the Empress. Everyone else wanted them to be different people, but she knew they weren't. If the Princess was a lie, then their universe and everything she cared about was doomed to failure, and the Empress had made herself irrefutable.

If they were the same person and both real, their universe had a chance, but it also meant that the Black Paladin and the Emperor were both real and both the same person. 

The Blue Lion wasn't nudging anything, just curling around, a presence that was gently waiting for her to sort herself out. Keith shifted, awkward, concerned and wanting to go over to her but afraid and unsure it'd be welcome or make things worse. Plachu was peeking again, even though he didn't need to, impatiently waiting for her to just accept what he thought was obvious.

Blue finally nudged one small thing in.

The absolute sickened outrage when she'd been _proud_ that Hira called her 'No Empress of mine', snarling the same rejection right back.

She was not the Empress because she chose not to be even when it meant striking at the dream of an Altea that had lived and thrived, because she was still sickened enough by the thought of genocide and slavery to reject everything she'd wanted that they'd offered, because she had pulled herself out of being so afraid she'd been willing to see an entire people as irredeemable monsters. 

Keith had chosen to trust when it hurt, to swallow his fear and anger enough to turn back and care about the others first.

The Zarkon that had taken her on flights in the Black Lion, helped teach her to fight, and loomed over her shoulder protectively to make sure anyone she flirted with was Worthy was real, as real as the Zarkon that had destroyed Altea, killed her father, and thrown her in a cell.

She did curl in on her self, hands around her knees, sobbing into her elbow. There was no way to form words out of it, and it was _worse_ because it had been real. Zarkon _could_ have done better, could have _stayed_ , the times he'd cared and been there for her had happened and were _gone_ because he'd turned on everything. 

And she did miss what things had been, him included, which hurt more for him being what had destroyed all of it. 

The Blue Lion wasn't interfering, but the gentle presence was seeping in the cracks, something soft lending support until it didn't feel like she'd fall apart completely. She didn't notice Plachu at first until there was a little knot of warm fur and small claws squirming up the inside of her sleeve to curl in a little ball on the inside of her dress against the markings in the hollow of her collarbone, a much louder stubborn presence for the contact with the marks. 

A couple seconds later there was a hand on her shoulder, and she tilted sideways, flopping over into Keith. He squawked, flailing for the moment he could get away with it before he had to move to make sure she didn't end up falling off the couch, and she ended up with part of his jacket wadded into her face, still sobbing and clinging to anything like _people_ that would prove she wasn't alone. 

Confused uncertainty and being half-terrified of doing something wrong and making it worse but not moving because of wanting to do something counted. When it started to flag and ebb into more of an ache to not be alone, there was more than just that room; the Castle was the same warm everpresent background noise as always. Lance was a bright, warm, slightly nervous ball that was open and easy to pick up on, distracted and fine, close to Pidge, throwing restless energy into their game, with Chulatt sneaking snacks and trying to cheer them on. Hunk wasn’t quite asleep, a more solid kind of warmth even when he was restless and a mess of what-if and why and maybe; Chuchule was with him, half-awake herself. Platt was asleep and content, probably in one of the pantries. 

The lions were a calmer background, Blue still curled around and through her, the others drowsing and minding their own Paladins with a shared feeling that even if things weren't alright _now_ , they were on a path to it.

_This is the reality where everything works out just fine._


	2. Past the Bones of Prophets and Warlords

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith is struggling to make sense of what he's supposed to be as the Black Paladin, and who Zarkon had been before he became the undead Emperor. Meanwhile, Pidge's curiosity ends up dragging a couple of the younger Blade out more, and Pidge makes a deal with them that turns into more than anyone had expected.

Keith was managing. He wasn't sure how he was managing, but nothing had blown up disasterously yet. 

It still felt like something important was missing; a few times he'd caught himself outside Shiro's door, wandering through the routine of checking up to make sure Shiro hadn't forgotten to eat or that he was at least making an attempt at sleep. 

He was getting better at handling the Black Lion, but he still felt too small for it; like he was a stand-in, trying to fill someone else's space. He wasn't sure what would happen when they found Shiro again - would the lions juggle back to where things were? Would they rearrange everything some other way? 

Every time he started running circles on that, there was a mental paw-bat from the Black Lion, interrupting his train of thought with a rumble and a few mental nudges. Black was easily as opinionated and stubborn as Red, just in different ways; less quickly temperamental, but faster to exert influence. 

Black did possibly more fussing at him in the back of his head, but there was something more possessive to it that made him even more unsure what the lion was going to do when they found Shiro. 

He'd gotten past feeling uncomfortable going down to the hangar, at least, although it'd given way to feeling lost and out of place. Trying to trace Shiro through it wasn't working; he'd tried several times, trying to grab for the lines connecting them to shake it or pull it or yell down it or - he wasn't sure what. Sometimes there were flickers of something - presence, recognition, but it was never solid enough for more than that.

After the third or fourth time, the Lion finally just prodded at him to deal with what was in front of him and be _patient_ , it had a plan. Black was confident that it knew what it was doing and that he was right where he should be.

The possessive edge was still confusing and unsettling. The Black Lion had been stubbornly intent on him being the one to take over for Shiro. It was what Shiro had wanted, but more than ever now that he'd gotten to interact with it more, he knew the Black Lion was stubborn and didn't exactly take orders. The Black Lion wouldn't have insisted on him if it hadn't been the Lion's choice that just happened to agree with Shiro's. He wasn't sure _why_ , particularly when Allura was right there with leadership training and social skills.

It didn't help that he only had two examples for "Black Paladin". He wasn't sure how he was supposed to live up to Shiro's example, and Zarkon...

All he knew of Zarkon was the undead tyrant.

Both Black and Red had compared him to Zarkon, and it left him with the mismatched dichotomy. There had been a time, long ago, when Zarkon had been someone the Black Lion _wanted_ ; when he'd been close friends with Alfor, had been around enough to influence Allura as she was growing up, when he'd joked with the others and weathered being thrown in a lake by the Altean queen with a white flag for his accidental insult.

Even the cockpit was larger than Red's; he felt like a kid sneaking into a fighter on the tarmac, settling into the pilot's seat and leaning back. The lion's quiet contentment, as if this were perfectly natural, wasn't helping to offset it. 

"So there's something I'm trying to figure out." 

The lion was listening, even though it probably already knew what he was trying to figure out how to ask.

"...Why me? I'm not - I barely know how to deal with people, I'm not a diplomat or anything, I don't relate to people very well, and ... I know you said I was going the right way to not repeat what Zarkon did _wrong_ , but I don't feel like I understand _Zarkon_ enough to know what I _should_ be doing." It was hard to even find a place to start in all of it. "I'm not sure how I'm the best choice to lead."

The starfield curled inward like a big, overpowered blanket piled over his head. 

"...That's not an answer." 

The lion was unmoved, convinced that it didn't matter if he could see it or not, the lion knew what it was doing. When Keith didn't budge, there was the impression of an eyeroll, and then the lion deciding how to address his concerns.

The result was a tangled mess of different threads of emotion and memory, all snarled together like day-old silly string, a cacophony that was impossible to pick anything out of that made Keith's head hurt. The lion only kept that up for a second before it stopped, prodding Keith expectantly for him to get the point.

If he wanted answers, he was going to have to pick a place to start and deal with one thing at a time. 

Keith huffed, thunking his head back against the pilot's seat. He wasn't sure how to frame the problem with him being awful with people, and wasn't sure what he'd have in common with Zarkon that would overcome that. "What did Zarkon do right" was apparently way too broad, even if he didn't have a clue what he was looking for besides that.

"That's the problem - I don't evne know where to _start_!" He looked up at the screens, hands raised in frustration. "What was he at his best? Can you give me a start there?"

The lion was easily as frustrated; they were at an impasse where lion needed some way to break down what it had, and Keith didn't know where to start to do that.

Keith sighed, slumping in the pilot's seat. "So do you have archives of stuff like what Red has?" After all, one of his few glimpses of what Zarkon had once been like had come from Red's hit-and-miss attempt at babysitting.

One of the screens went into a 'loading/thinking' bar, then brought up a directory with recorded files, organized by dates he didn't know how to read. He wasn't even sure what he was looking at, so he just picked one at random in the earlier part of the list, or what he thought was the earlier part of the list.

The lion sent a clearer impression - "needle in a haystack".

It was quickly evident he was looking at a video journal or log of some kind, a list of recordings of Zarkon, sitting in the cockpit, rattling off some kind of standard stardate Keith didn't know how to interpret, and going into verbal entries. It seemed like something that should've been useful, but his random clicking around was getting mostly dry narrations of tactical situations with no context and occasional grumpy comments about politics or this leader or that one who was either starting needless conflicts, rejecting attempts at finding solutions to conflicts, or dragging their feet on petty crap. There were almost as many grumbles about the other paladins 'getting into trouble' and 'displaying a complete lack of survival instinct'; Alfor's name was the one that came up that way the most often, then 'Blaytz' and 'Trigel'. Even that was restrained from editorial commentary that might've been useful.

Keith stubbornly spent a good hour at it, but if Zarkon recorded his actual thoughts and reasoning anywhere, it wasn't in this log. About all that stuck out were a few mentions of courtship attempts in the early logs that had Zarkon visibly failing to suppress a cat-on-tinfoil reaction. There was a small window of occasional entries where the reaction grew more frustrated and unsettled, then even that small window into Zarkon-the-person disappeared from mention. 

The lion was sure that almost the entire video log was like that, and that looking for other records logged in its computer would just be different angles of needles and haystacks.  
He folded his arms, slumping back in the seat. "Fine. Do you have any better ideas?"

The answer was a resounding 'maybe', and 'not now'. 

Keith gave the screens a tired, dim look. "....Are you always this helpful?"

Another mental eyeroll, and the lion started nudging him about sleep, and how long it'd been since he'd at least attempted it, with a bunch of attached little grumpy fragments about weakening himself and needing rest to keep acting at full capacity.

He was getting herded about not taking care of himself by a giant mechanical lion.

After a brief sulk the lion was wholly unimpressed by, he left the hangar, heading back to his room.

Sleep didn't come that easily, and after a few minutes of just staring uncertainly at his bed, he sat down and pulled up the room's computer screen. He knew the Castle had archives, it was just a matter of finding them.

He made it all of half an hour into trying to navigate the Altean directories on voice commands that he wasn't sure always translated right to the computer, bringing up massive archives of files. He could get it to display different languages, but none of them were Earth languages. The two defaults it seemed to favor were Altean and Galran; he wasn't sure if that had to do with how many Galra used to be on the ship, or just the ship recognizing that he was Galra and assuming he'd understand it. He managed to get a few others that he did not recognize at all before he gave up, flopping out on the bed to stare at the ceiling.

He tried to sleep, then brought out his tablet, poking a couple of mindless games before he finally just opted for pulling up a book and reading until he managed to sleep.

There was a faint disjoint to the unusually vivid dream; the contrast between a set of senses and identity that was utterly normal and utterly foreign at the same time. The area was harsh, barren, blackened stone with broken rocks, ridges, and hills spreading out from the mouth of a small cave; the sky was reddish-grey and thick with smoke and clouds, lit in flashes by ship engines and gunfire. He was inside the entrance, catching his breath but not going all the way inside with the others - not until _everyone_ was inside and the last of them had made it to safety.

Alfor's red armor was weaving across the field, using rock outcroppings for some cover from mechanized traps and the notice of small fighters overhead. He made it just to the open area leading down to the cave entrance when something went off - a flash of light from the ground nearby, a bola of blue-white energy launched suddenly from too close to dodge.

Alfor went down with a burst and a cry of pain over the comms as it snapped shut around his legs. Three of the small fighters turned sharply, no doubt picking up on the trap going off.

Even if the Red Lion launched herself from the Castle the moment he was hit, she wouldn't be able to make it there before the fighters had a clean shot.

He was already moving as that realization swept through all of them. It wasn't so much a train of thought as a sudden stubborn insistence; he knew what was about to happen, and

IT

WOULD

NOT.

He reached Alfor just ahead of the fighters swinging around, barely bringing his shield down in time for the first barrage to hit it, the force field digging into the dirt as the beam scattered around them like a hose against a barrier; it took all his strength to keep from being pushed back, and he could feel the shield waning dangerously, but it held long enough for them to pass over. 

Before they could come around, he turned sharp, summoning the bayard into a heavy firearm that was half as long as he was tall, a massive rifle that fired a shot worthy of starship weaponry. It cleaved through one of the fighters, sending shards of smoking debris falling to the battered earth. 

There was a massive roar as he trained on the second fighter. Before the rifle had finished charging up for a second shot, the Black Lion came down through the smoke and clouds, catching the fighter in its jaws with a feline shake and throw that reduced it to more rubble. The lion landed heavily over them, kicking up dirt and rocks as the third fighter wheeled around, shots impacting its armor with little more to show for it than some heated sheen on the plating. 

That last fighter banked hard, away from the lion and back toward reinforcements; the lion let loose its own beam, the main cannon in its jaws obliterating the small ship. 

There were others coming; they couldn't stay there, but with the lion moving along with him, they now had a better plan than "hunker down until there's enough of a lull in the firefight to make it to the lion". He scooped Alfor up one-handed, the Altean hanging onto his shoulder so that he could still keep his bayard ready in the other hand, just in case.  
It wasn't needed; the lion turned, a bigger presence with the boundaries between the armored figure on the ground and the great beast blurred out as they made for the cave. The lion was already dropping to open its jaws for entry, hitting the ground behind him as he stopped in the entrance. 

The others didn't need any kind of signal to pick up and run for the lion themselves. They'd soon be back on the Castle, where he could pass Alfor off to the medics while everyone else retrieved the other three lions, and then the assault group that'd tried to ambush them away from the lions would regret the attempt. 

******************************************

Keith wasn't paying much attention to time. There wasn't an immediate alert; they were en route to another engagement, which meant catching up on normal routines. 

He spent time in the training bay, trying to get used to the Black Bayard. It was only slightly heavier than the Red Bayard, but still felt strange in his hands, the weight different.  
The rifle Zarkon had summoned in the dream-memory stuck in his mind, and he tried a few times to see if he could get it to change, shifting his grip and posture and willing it to be the heavy rifle.

It was like trying to push water; nothing happened.

He'd asked the lion for something that would show Zarkon at his best, some clue what he had in common that it had wanted or to what he should be trying to work towards, but he felt even more like he'd somehow been shoved into the wrong place. It wasn't that he couldn't see himself charging out into a field under fire to snatch one of the others who was injured; he'd already pulled something like that at least once, getting between Zarkon and the Black Lion to cover Shiro.

He seriously doubted he was capable of the raw power Zarkon had managed, fighting off fighter craft on foot on what amounted to force of will alone. Red had moved on her own before to save him, something that he'd turned into a planned tactic, trusting the lion to be there when he did things like jump out of airlocks and blow holes in station walls, but there were definite limits to that, and the way Zarkon and the Black Lion had moved in tandem felt impossible. 

He burned energy on the training drones for a while, sleepwalked through a shower still dazed and trying to figure out where he belonged in that image, and wandered to the small mess they'd been using. Now that they had more allies and something like sources of supplies, they had options besides the ration goo, but he didn't have the energy or focus to go looking through the pantries and get something together, so he just flipped through the machine's settings to the Galran synthetic, getting a bowl and settling at the table with it.

He wasn't alone with his thoughts for very long. Pidge and Hunk wandered in, deep in some conversation about the Castle's machinery that had English words in it but didn't sound like any language Keith recognized; he tuned them out, poking the bowl as much as eating while they went through cabinets.

He didn't notice that their conversation had reached a lull or that he'd gotten their attention until the bowl was pulled away, replaced with a plate with some kind of seared, glazed red meat. 

Keith blinked at it a couple times and looked up; Hunk was holding the bowl of goo, frowning. "Now that we've got actual food, there's no reason you should be punishing yourself with the goo." Pidge was standing just behind him, arms crossed and an eyebrow raised at Keith.

"Uh." Keith blinked at them both, then at the steak. "Thanks?"

"Don't mention it." Hunk dumped the bowl of goo out, dropping it into slot that went to the dishwasher, and set a couple other plates down across from Keith. The other two meals looked like mostly unfamiliar alien vegetables chopped and sauteed, scattered over oblong-pale cooked grains with a pale fish-meat that he'd come to recognize as something some Galra ships raised in tanks.

"I've been poking some of the Blade to build off what I learned from Sal about Galran food. It's been made a little more complicated since they're like, completely different culture groups besides the differences in resources and availability for civilians in stable territory compared to whatever you'd call the Blade and all their little ships and stations, but I think I've got enough to make something healthy and adjust spices for stuff like you being immune to capsaicin and stuff that'd taste different." Hunk was gesturing with the small spork while he talked, taking his time with his own food; Pidge, meanwhile, was indulging in the special kind of inhaling food that was usually seen in starving dogs, military, and students on short schedules.

Keith looked down at the plate again and the utensils that'd been set across it, tentatively cutting a piece off and staring at it. He knew Hunk'd been making an effort to learn about the different alien groups they were dealing with, he just hadn't really been expecting Hunk to aim that at _him_ , and it was...

Foreign in a way that didn't feel bad at all, but was just sort of glancing off oddly. He knew they'd all taken the realization that he was part Galra well enough, but it'd mostly been either as if it'd never come up at all, or awkward floundering like what'd happened in the Weblum. He'd never expected much acknowledging it like this; his relationship with the Blades who were on the ship often was still awkward, and the only connection he'd ever had to that side of his heritage besides was the knife, a couple side references his father had made to his mother that'd never made sense before, and a couple small things kicking around the shack that he still didn't understand and had never recognized as "alien".  
And here Hunk was, cobbling together something that was _Galran_ out of nowhere. 

"Honestly I'm not sure how you managed so long eating as much of the Altean goo as you were. There's enough dietary requirements in common that we were okay with it," Hunk gestured between himself and Pidge, "But they're like.... weighted more toward a plant based diet than humans? And you're barely less of an obligate carnivore than most full-blooded Galra." 

Keith briefly wrinkled his nose before taking an experimental bite of the steak; it was a momentary distraction - whatever Hunk had cobbled together reminded him of a cocoa-balsamic-habanero glaze he'd found a few times in one of the small towns in the area of the Garrison. "Eh, it wasn't any worse than dealing with what I'd been getting most of my life. It's...not like schools and group homes have 'half alien' diet options." 

Hunk frowned, making a weird little fussy frustrated noise. 

"That's actually something I've been wondering about." Pidge had finally slowed down over her own food enough to start wedging words in between. "How that even works. I could see an Altean hybrid, since their weird adaptive shapeshifting physiology would hypothetically have way better odds of overcoming genetic incompatibility, but Galra aren't shapeshifters and don't seem like they'd classify phylogenetically anywhere near terrestrial primates." 

"Pidge..." Keith did follow it, but almost wished he didn't. 

It didn't even seem to slow her down. "But going by some of what we've seen, they seem like they can crossbreed viably with almost anything. It's almost a shame nobody ever figured it out before, I mean I guess it's for the better since it meant nobody trying to experiment on you, but there's so much that could be learned if we could figure out how that even works-"

He'd gone from grimacing, to almost burying his face in his steak, to raising a hand, all of it ignored.

" _Pidge._ I planted bombs around the Garrison and ran away partly because I _didn't_ want to be dissected as a specimen."

She flinched, shrinking down to a pair of glasses behind her plate, while Hunk cringed uncertainly. "Sorry! It's just - you know, you're kind of unique and it's hard not to be curious and it wouldn't be invasive to check over the biometric scan readings-"

"PIDGE."

She raised her hands in surrender, or attempt at parley, or something. "Okay but seriously. Knowing what we're looking at, with access to the Castle's databases and any of the Blade that have the time, Coran and them and us can probably make more sense of it than anybody on Earth ever did. Haven't you ever wanted to know what was going on and why?"  
He opened his mouth to snap, but it wasn't working; he had all the reflexive bristle at getting poked and prodded, but it was getting trampled under the weight of years with half his medical records being a list of medical terms that roughly translated to "we don't even know what the fuck we're looking at". 

"....Yeah." He slumped, poking at the steak. Hunk let out a heavy breath, slumping himself as he relaxed from being ready to grab one or the other of them. 

"You know that's not a new angle, right?"

All three of them jumped at the voice from the doorway, Keith almost falling over the bench twisting around and grabbing for his knife.

Kuviro was leaning in the door, completely nonplussed. "Galra aren't shapeshifters, but our original homeworld was a pretty harsh and variable environment; everything from there has this convoluted epigenetic-bioenergetic control system that basically swaps around some variable areas for whatever seems like it'll keep the whole survivable out of a bunch of extra genetic crap passed down. It doesn't always work for hybrids, but basically you've got this thing mashing stuff together until it finds something that works. It's not really my field, so I'm not great on the specifics, but we've had a few people that've gone delving into it."

Keith blinked, not moving, still twisted around awkwardly on the bench with one hand on the knife and one on the table to keep from falling. Pidge blinked widely, and Hunk hadn't moved. 

"Uh. Thanks? That. Explains a lot, a guess." Pidge adjusted her glasses.

"We're garbage dumps. The only reason there's recognizable common traits so consistently is that the mechanisms are _really_ stubborn about a few defining traits as a core framework. The Empire doesn't like too much study on it usually, 'cuz it makes it obvious how much 'pure Galra' is a joke, even if you skip signs that the original population on Daibazaal had more than one distinct population." Kuviro left the doorway, walking across the mess to poke through cabinets. "From what little we know of pre-Imperial history, I'm not even sure Zarkon himself is 'pure' Daibazaal Galran." Kuviro looked back over his shoulder, squinting at Keith for a moment. "You being able to pass for normal human was either a miracle or took some tampering." 

Keith scrunched his face with a shrug. "It's not like I've met many other half-Galra to know."

That got a snort from the Blade. "You just haven't seen them with their masks off yet." 

Keith hadn't thought about it before, but it did make sense - they were too embattled to turn away someone capable.

"So are there a lot of half-Galra Marmorans?" Hunk paused, self-consciously. "I mean, it doesn't mess with that weird magic thing with the blades or anything?"

Kuviro paused in the middle of reaching for something back in the cabinet. "Well, the whole bioenergetic thing that gets passed down doesn't dilute enough until you get to like...a quarter or less." He was distracted from it by fishing out some kind of package in the back, opening it with a claw enough to start fishing out strips of some kind of dried meat. "We've got people that aren't _Blades_ exactly, too, and some of them are completely non-Galra like Slav, you just don't see them normally unless you're living in one of the bases or something." 

"It seemed like too organized of an operation to be only leeching on the Empire," Pidge observed, picking over the last bits on her plate. 

Keith had gone quiet, mostly working on the steak. With the number of things he'd been able to work, he had to wonder how much of the Empire could get screwed up by a resistance group with one or two brave enough hybrids in their ranks. 

The implication that there were civilians associated with the Blade, kept out of sight in secure locations, was gnawing on him, too; he doubted any of them that ended up with families would risk them in larger Imperial space, where they could be targeted, used as hostages or leverage, or risk children getting indoctrinated by the Empire. The Blade didn't discriminate against half Galra, he knew that from how quickly he'd been accepted as "Galra" by them and how casual Kuviro was about there being other half Galra in their ranks. 

He could've grown up among Galra, where he wouldn't have been juggled between homes. The incident with the vegan family where he'd almost died wouldn't have happened, he wouldn't have dealt with teachers getting after him for asking what color something was until he started tuning out anything that wasn't in the normal human visual range, there wouldn't have been the endless parade of doctors with no idea what was going on fumbling around with him. 

He would've known what he was from the beginning, whether his mother had been there or not.

It was a painful thing to wrestle with. In his more self-aware moods, he knew that the most likely reason the Blade were so secretive about his mother was that she was probably in deep cover somewhere, and that the silence was a safety measure for both of them. He knew Earth was both the middle of nowhere to the larger inhabited Universe, an ignored backwater "primitive" hick planet, and one of the few places where he _could've_ grown up without the shadow of the Empire over him. Even with his father's death, it was still one of the "safest" options.

He still had to wonder if she could've arranged for him to be passed to the other Blade, or even gotten both him and his father to them. The way Kolivan and Antok had reacted initially, she definitely hadn't said anything about having a kid or family somewhere, and that was the most uncomfortable question of all; why wouldn't she tell them, at least?

Then Pidge reached across the table to poke his shoulder with a spork. "Hey. Earth to Keith. ...Or Castle to Keith, I guess." 

He flinched away, startled; all three of them were staring at him, and the conversation had probably gone on without him.

"Kuviro was just saying that you could give him a copy of your medical records and he'd relay it to one of their medics, so they can give you a better idea of things." She motioned with the utensil at the Blade, who was giving him an uncomfortable amount of scrutiny.

He nodded, shooting Kuviro's suspicious look back with interest.

Kuviro rolled his eyes with a weird, low-pitch trill. "Man, if I didn't know our Leader would kill me..." He shook his head. "Well, I'm gonna be on the ship for a bit longer, and I'm sure you can find me easy enough to send that off." 

The Blade walked out with the package of dried meat.

Hunk and Pidge were both looking at him in concerned confusion. "You okay there?" 

"Yeah. Fine." He tugged his plate a little closer, going back to focusing on what was left of his meal.

"So uh. Have you asked them about the thing with your Mom at all? Like, if they've got a clue who she was or anything?" 

He closed his eyes, feeling suddenly less hungry at Hunk's question. "They won't - can't - tell me anything." 

Hunk cringed back, looking away and fidgeting, and Pidge decided her plate was the most fascinating thing in the room. "Oh. Er. Sorry." 

Keith sighed. "It's fine." It wasn't fine, but it wasn't like Hunk had been doing anything worse than blundering around grating on raw nerves with good intentions. "I'm sure I'll be able to find out sooner or later." 

***************************************

Lotor's mood had dropped the second Axca read off the logs of the battlecruisers and larger ships docked at the transit hub they were stopping at. 

Most of it was normal traffic for the area; ships on standard patrols and lower officers on routine errands. 

Then there was Warlord Rannveig's flagship, outside of his normal territory, with no reason to be there besides waiting for him to arrive.

They'd all heard the rumor mill without even needing effort to eavesdrop. With Sendak still missing, Rannveig was among the higher ranked, more respected officers in the Empire; everyone had expected Haggar to name one of those established leaders as Emperor Pro Tem during Zarkon's convalescence. 

Someone the Empire would already respect, someone in the normal mold of a Proper Galran Leader.

He knew that list well, and knew that every name on it was one that would be seeing his appointment as a slight against them.

Rannveig just happened to be very ambitious and very proactive about his ambitions - and was already a prime suspect for a few Incidents with some of Lotor's private, off-record projects.

"I'll get to punch him one day, right Lotor?"

Of course Zethrid was the one to voice just how thrilled all of them were to deal with the Warlord.

"As much as I would like to think we could cow him enough without a direct confrontation... yes. I'm sure you will."

Zethrid growled, smacking her fist against one palm; even if a fight was almost an inevitability, they still weren't solid enough politically to get away with starting it themselves yet, and had to play nice and abide by normal political maneuvering. At least Rannveig usually left his second in command running his operations when he ducked out of his territory; Rannveig, by himself and in open line of sight, was a very straightforward kind of brute.

That tiny silver lining vanished after they'd disembarked and reached the station's main command room.

Rannveig's lieutenant commander looked out of place among most of the others of that high a rank; she was short for a Galra, and not that imposing of a presence. Lotor was almost certain there was just enough Altean somewhere in her lineage to leave a few lingering traces in her build and the telltale gleaming secondary pupil, but after the way she'd carved a swift and bloody swathe to the top, he didn't want to go snooping where he'd draw attention unnecessarily. Apparently there'd been bets for a while when she'd reached her current rank on how long it would be before she either challenged Rannveig or he had an "unfortunate accident", but she had done the dangerously prudent thing and settled in a rank where she had a great deal of power, but someone else had the main target sign on their back.

Rannveig was a straightforward brute when he was acting openly and alone. Rannveig with Krolia present meant there was a high risk of something more subtle being arranged.

Lotor squared his shoulders, his generals falling into a formation behind him. "Warlord Rannveig. I had thought you were occupied in your own territory; had I known you were here, I would have prepared more of a welcome." 

Rannveig's territory was one of the ones that'd suffered a significant increase in rebellion activity of late, and the way Rannveig's lip curled briefly, the implied jab was not lost on him. 

"Well, I heard you would be in the area, _your Eminence_ , and thought I would see your efforts to address the Empire's _problems_ myself." 

"I have been focusing my efforts on repairing our damaged infrastructure and apprehending the greatest threat to the Empire at current. I had thought you and your peers would be able to manage your own territories long enough for that, at least." Lotor gave a dismissive wave. "Voltron is the rallying point for this current wave of insurgence; once it has been dealt with, the rest should fall back into line with little effort. I also have not noticed anyone _else_ making efforts to address the blow to our supply lines caused by the destruction of the Komar."

Rannveig snorted. "You mean the secret resources you've been hoarding for yourself while you dash around making feints and letting them get away?" 

Lotor's eyes narrowed; Rannveig had just admitted to interfering. A brief grimace flickered across Krolia's face behind Rannveig's back.

"My _preliminary research_ is barely enough to allow me to pursue Voltron without overtaxing the rest of our resources. I _will_ make the Komar look as useless as a solar sail when my work is complete, but I am not fool enough to advertise my work where it can be sabotaged by _malcontents_ who place their own ambition above the good of the Empire." He knew Zethrid had edged forward slightly, bristling and looming over his shoulder. "Perhaps you should consider how to stabilize your own territory more, since it seems to be proving the need to consider moving _forward_ and perhaps showing less insecurity in our fervor to 'prove' our might." 

Rannveig snarled, baring teeth; Krolia gave up on any effort to mask tired frustration for a moment, schooling it before she opened her mouth, bringing up her computer screen off her wrist. "Sir, we have word from the tracking team in quadrant 543-V."

Rannveig did not acknowledge her at first, the snarl growing frustrated at the interruption; there were a couple of beats, then he growled and straightened. "I am more than capable of putting down rebellions - something you have yet to prove you know how to do." The warlord turned sharply, exiting with Krolia.

The generals made no more comment than a low whistle from Ezor while they were around the facility itself. Even if they were hypothetically in a position of authority, they all knew it was a very forced welcome, and were too used to dealing with the minefield that was being a bunch of "Half-breeds" around "real Galra". 

The commentary was saved for when they were back on their ship, with nobody around but drones and a few oddball Galran crew that Lotor had pulled from various places; mostly perfectly competent individuals that'd been forced into roles as bottom-feeders in the military for being less aggressive than their peers, or skilled civilians that didn't fit the mold of Imperial dogma that he'd found before they got themselves disappeared or openly arrested and executed. 

None of them were allowed anywhere near the bridge or their upper quarters and general space - Lotor would not risk compromising what little security they had, no matter how thoroughly he vetted his crew. 

The common room at the entrance to the area with their quarters was somewhat sparse and shabby compared to the rest of the ship, a few broad couches and a table and chairs scattered around it with storage cabinets along the walls and a couple counters. Zethrid sprawled across one of the couches, taking up almost all of it. 

"Man, I can't wait until we get to where we can just go through the ranks and make with the killing." 

"That may not come for some time." Lotor sank into one of the chairs. "We need to have a more stable power base and not have Zarkon or the witch looming over us, or we'll only destabilize everything and throw the universe into chaos."

"Still got nothing on that front." Ezor raised her empty hands, heading toward one of the cabinets. "She's definitely up to something, but I can't get in at all." 

"And Voltron?" Zethrid had definitely noticed the absence of it in the list of things between them and remaking the Empire.

"I already have that well planned out. It is certainly a current threat, but one that I am confident we can handle." 

Zethrid would be the one most thrown off balance when he was finally able to drop the game, but for now, he couldn't risk that explanation, not when a Druid or Haggar could decide to grab one of them at any time for information they would have no choice but to give. 

"So what are we doing? We're all over on this project of yours but I haven't seen any sign of progress, and we're getting more guns aimed at us every quintent."

He sighed. Patience was not one of Zethrid's strong suits. "I have an idea that will make it simple to get anyone vaguely reasonable in the Empire falling behind my banner so that we can avoid the unnecessary bloodshed, but it is not one that I can risk until it's completed, and Zarkon's predicament has shoved the timetable for it considerably shorter." 

Emphasis on 'unnecessary' was something he needed with Zethrid. Even if he won over most of the Empire, there'd be more than enough die-hard zealots in the upper ranks she could take out her frustrations on when they finally had actual control. 

For now, he had more freedom of movement to find parts and figure out how to make it work, way more attention on him risking Haggar figuring it out and coming after him, and much less time to come up with something usable he could present before he'd need it to avoid plunging the universe into bloody havoc. 

He needed to address the practical concerns of the Empire before he could dream of getting them to listen to him seriously about drawing down aggression, and to do that, he needed some way to gather enough energy to run the universe they'd built that didn't rely on genocide or sacrifices in any form. 

"I will, at least, have something to show for my efforts soon, thanks to our recent prize." 

Zethrid made a faint noise, but it was enough to settle her questions.

***********************************

It took Pidge a while to work up the nerve to fish for anything that might help find Matt from the Blades that were hanging around the Castle off and on. They'd proven to be surprisingly easy to work with after whatever had gone down with Shiro and Keith at their base, but there was still standoffish distance; they were secretive and not incredibly big on social interaction, usually keeping to themselves. 

They were perfectly willing to share intelligence that might be of use in the war effort as long as it wouldn't compromise one of their operatives still undercover, but not exactly easy to talk to. Finding her family wasn't a major tactical objective, and they were _very_ mission-focused in every interaction she'd had, their general tactical situation too dicey to afford anything extraneous. 

She'd never managed to bring herself to ask Kolivan, but the younger Blades were about as approachable as they got, and a couple of them seemed to be hanging around Keith off and on, and after one of them had blown through being almost conversational, it seemed worth a shot. 

They didn't hang around the same parts of the Castle as the Paladins did. It wasn't hard; the Castle was a huge ship, and would have been as much of a mobile base with attached town as a "ship". She had to check the computer to narrow down where they were in all of the various temporary quarters areas and larger zones. Some of the hallways in between there and the areas they stuck to were still not fully online, hallways lit only by emergency lighting until she got to the other area of crew quarters.

She wasn't sure what to expect from the Blade when she reached the common room the temporary quarters fanned off from; all of their interactions with the Blade had been very mission-focused and distant, and it wasn't like she'd actually put much thought to what Black Ops Super-Secret Galra Ninja Spies did when they weren't being Ninja Spies.

An awkward silence fell over the room as soon as the door opened and everything stopped. Neither of them were in armor. She'd seen the shorter one with his mask off at least, since he'd had it off when he'd shown up raiding the kitchen, but she couldn't recall ever seeing a Blade out of armor before. The one that'd blown through was on the floor leaning against the couch with three computer screens up covered in walls of Galran text with some kind of superscript notations in one of the windows. There was one of the water packs next to him with a straw, three or four crumpled up and empty scattered around. Another bag of dried meat strips was cut open and sitting on the other side. He'd scavenged one of the stray housecoat-type robes from the Castle, plain grey and sleeveless, colored markings running down the fur on his arms.

The taller one was scaly, more muted blue and indigo, gangled all over the couch with one leg draped over the back. He had a circle of screens that looked like the Galra equivalent of what happened when she got bored - she recognized programming code in one of them, and some kind of paused video in another that looked like some random movie serial; he had some kind of larger filled wrap in his hands, tail curled around to work the computer screen, and more of a spread of empty water and drink pouches and food containers beside the couch.

She was not sure what she had expected.

"Geek College Dorm" was definitely not it. The scene remained still for a few long ticks, her blinking in the doorway, both of them blinking at her from where they were. She raised a hand in a very stilted, confused wave.

The one who'd raided the kitchen blinked again and raised a hand, not moving otherwise.

"...Uh, so." She was suddenly even less sure what she was doing. "I know you guys don't have a lot of time for stuff that isn't your actual missions and surviving and all, but we've got a quintent or so before we're out of wormhole, ssooo, uh."

"Yeeees?" The shorter one was motioning for her to get on with it, and they were both still staring.

"Well, there was. Something I wanted to ask you about that was kind of personal, and uh. I guess I could help with if there's anything I could do to help if there's anything?"

The taller one with the tail had a processing moment growing into a clear expression of impending doom, while the shorter one processed into something like she'd just promised five years of Christmas all at once. She wasn't sure what she'd just done, but it was apparently Something. 

"Do you have full access to the Castle's records and history archives?"

She knew that sparkle face. It'd been her own reaction to _friendly_ (supposedly, at least) artificial life forms. 

"Er. I think so? I haven't...actually tried much..." While it was on the list of things she had some curiosity about, it wasn't anything useful for their current missions or finding her family, and she hadn't had the time or energy to go through it as a hobby thing when there were actual entertainment things available. "The last time I went through it was just.... trying to go through logs of distress calls and that kind of thing to try and get an idea what we were dealing with now, and it was kind of depressing."

"But the archives from before the Empire spread are intact, right?" He'd twisted around like a ferret to prop up on the back of the couch; the taller one sighed and was already starting to save and close down whatever he'd been working on. 

"I think so?" She was seriously considering taking a few steps back. "We had some data corruption after the whole Sendak incident, but I don't think those were really affected.......uh...." She did edge slightly back. "I can probably get some of it copied over to your devices? It'd be easier from my workshop in the hangar..."

Between that and blinking, she had been picked up, hugged hard enough to knock the wind out of her, and was getting carried off down the hallway toward the hangar at a run accompanied by a noise that should have come from a dolphin. 

Somewhere in between there and the hangar, the taller one - Regris - had caught up and managed to get the other - Kuviro - to "PUT THE PALADIN DOWN". She hurried as fast as she could, Kuviro hovering behind her making occasional weird squeaking noises, Regris hovering behind him and doing some kind of weird throat-clearing rattle-rumble whenever he looked like he might pick her up again. 

Rationally it made perfect sense that the Blade, off-duty and in a situation where they didn't need to be as secretive and paranoid, would not only be people like anyone else, but the special kind of eccentric screwball boxed-ferrets that you found around any place full of hypercompetent specialists. 

Less rationally, the two of them had managed to destroy the Mysterious Galra Ninja Warrior Spy image in less than ten minutes, moreso than Kolivan and Antok had managed at the dinner back on Olkarion.

Partway there, Kuviro managed actual words again, although it was a string of babble that had her wondering if this is what it was like for everyone else dealing with her some days. "Even if there's some corruption this'll still be - I mean you don't understand this is - we've been scraping around digging for scraps for thousands of years -" 

"Hey, Kuviro." Regris nudged his shoulder from behind. "There's this thing called breathing. It's something you should try."

Pidge glanced back with a raised eyebrow and a helpless look; she still wasn't entirely sure what she'd just triggered. Kuviro blinked in confusion; the bright eyeshine in the dimly lit hallway would've been unnerving if she hadn't gotten so used to Allura and Coran by that point. 

Regris nudged his shoulder again and jerked his head at her. 

Kuviro blinked at him. 

Regris made some kind of hand gesture she didn't catch that was either some Galran thing she wasn't familiar with or some kind of sign language fragment.

Kuviro took a deep breath. "So I'm an archivist, which is pretty much one of the most dangerous jobs after long-term infiltration duty. We've been trying to reconstruct the culture and history of our people that Zarkon destroyed, and a lot of the rest of history from before the Empire's expansion. Zarkon had a few thousand years head-start on us for wiping everything out and trying to twist everything around to the Official Story, so we've basically spent centuries scouring for scraps and things the Empire missed.... aaaaand you can imagine how well they take to anybody sniffing around stuff that challenges the Official Imperial Dogma." 

She nodded slowly through it, comprehension dawning. "...And the Castle's got a huge archive that hasn't been touched for ten thousand years that they couldn't get to at all." 

Kuviro nodded enthusiastically. "I've been poking at what I can but we've only got guest access; the public accessible archives are still more than we could've gotten in five hundred years, but there's limits on how much I can download and some things that I can't get into, and Regris keeps saying he won't help with it because it's 'Rude to break into the computer systems of allies when you don't need to'." Regris rolled his eyes with a snort at Kuviro's affronted sarcastic impression.

She couldn't even be insulted by it - she would've been trying to crack the security on anything she couldn't get into that she actually wanted to get at herself, and if Coran didn't expect that from her by now, he hadn't been paying attention. She was aware of bits of Earth's history that were still being dug back up and reconstructed after attempts at erasing them, things that people shoved under the rug until it had turned into a jigsaw puzzle made of crumbs; it hurt to even try to fathom what that kind of thing would look like after ten thousand years of a fascist dictatorship making organized efforts. 

It was enough to make her throat tighten, and her stomach knot a little that they hadn't thought to offer it before - history and cultural archives were hardly sensitive information for them. Green was paying attention, bright and focused and in full agreement to help. "...I'll get you everything I can." 

They reached one of the lifts that would take them to the area of the hangars, silence hanging for a little while, Kuviro still hovering in her personal space. Regris was the first one to break it, something she hadn't been expecting.

"So what were you wanting to ask about?" It was a snap back to the present; she almost felt guilty, but she was sure her father and brother would easily forgive her forgetting to ask about them when faced with that kind of destruction of knowledge. 

"Oh, well...." She looked down, shifting weight. "The Kerberos mission - the one the Galra grabbed Shiro from? ....The other two were my father and brother."

Kuviro went more still, and Regris nodded.

"They split them up and sent them away somewhere; I've been trying to find them, but their records of people sent to work camps are a mess. I found something about Matt when we raided Beta-Traz, but I don't know where he is, and there was _nothing_ about Dad...."

Kuviro shrank a little with an awkward shift; Regris put a hand on her shoulder that engulfed it. "I don't know how much we can do, but if we've got anything, I'll send it your way as fast as I can." 

"...Thanks."

It wasn't far from where the lift dropped them off to the hangar. The Lion was waiting, loud enough in Pidge's head that she was sure Green was Up To Something, but she wasn't entirely sure what. 

"Alright, give me a minute to bring everything up and get it hooked up...Green apparently wants to help." She shot the lion an odd look, but got no explanation from it; both of the Blades looked up at the lion. She suspected they'd gotten into some kind of unwinnable staring contest for a couple minutes as she was hooking up cables, before there was a distracted noise and Regris broke it off to get some of the other cables and Kuviro went fishing for a couple of thin black devices. By Earth standards, they would've been about average for a good-sized external hard drive, which meant they probably could hold an absolutely ludicrous amount of data. 

She barely got the computer screens up before the Lion was shoving things into the file queue that Pidge didn't recognize, taking over her search string; she sighed and shrugged to the two Blades, who returned it with a confused nod to go ahead. 

"Alright, here goes nothing." 

She tapped the button on the screen to start the download.

The loading bar drug on for several doboshes. She kept track; by the time it had passed the longest she'd ever spent downloading from hostile Galran computers where she had to deal with decrypting and security slowing things down, it wasn't even an eighth of the way done. Regris and Kuviro were both starting to stare at it in incredulous confusion.  
The alert that Kuviro's drive had run out of storage space came not long after that. 

"What in _raknar_ is it trying to download?!" Kuviro leaned over her shoulder, tapping a couple things quickly to open the source directory and bring up the archive.

It was larger than anything Pidge had ever seen in a single directory; while the Blade was squinting at filenames in Galran and bringing up the archive's general information, she mouthed 'What the hell' at the Lion, getting nothing but a wave of smug in response.

The high pitched noise wasn't quite the dolphin squeak from earlier; Pidge could only barely hear it, and there were a couple moments of silence where Kuviro's mouth was open and she was pretty sure she just couldn't hear whatever was going on. Regris leaned over with a squint to see what it was, and then his eyes went wide with a raspy stutter-rattle. 

Between the two of them, Pidge could barely get a look at the screen, standing on tiptoe and trying to figure out how to get around two Galra that were easily three or more times her size; the sound of the door opening off to the side didn't even register. "What is it? What'd Green barf up?" 

Both of the Blades turned, making frantic gestures and pointing between her, the lion, and the screens, but she wasn't sure either of them were even managing intelligible words, much less sentences. She raised an eyebrow and leaned back.

"It's - it's -", was the first thing Kuviro managed.

"It's _DAIBAZAAL_ ," Regris cut in.

Pidge blinked. "......The planet?" 

She would not admit later that the first idea that brought to mind was some kind of data archive and set of protocols for trying to regenerate the lost homeworld later, but with all the other insane things they'd run into so far with the lions, it didn't seem that far-fetched. 

Kuviro was waving his hands frantically, stringing the words together breathlessly. "No, it's - it's an archive of the _entire planetary public internet_ from just before the planet was destroyed!"

Pidge's own eyes went wide as she stared at the computer; odds were that the internet back on Earth was a pale shadow of what an advanced civilization like theirs would've had, and Green had just.... coughed it up casually like a cat dropping a dead mouse on the doorstep. "I knew Green hoarded files like a ferret hiding scrunchies under the fridge, but..."

The lion was purring loudly and smugly in her head.

"It's - it's our _homeworld_ , books and data archives and online libraries, pop culture and dumb social media and news archives and _everything_ \- everything we were that Zarkon's been erasing for thousands of years! I - I could be digging through this for my entire _life_ and not have it all catalogued!"

Kuviro sounded the opposite of upset at that prospect. 

"You've .... been trying to rebuild history?"

All three of them went silent and froze, staring up at Allura just inside the doorway. The Princess looked pensive and half lost. 

"You should have said something-" She shook her head. "No, I should apologize for not thinking of it; I knew Zarkon was trying to erase history, and I hadn't even considered how much we had that would've been lost." 

Kuviro made a few weird warbling rattle noises, gesturing dazedly between Allura, the screen, and the lion.

"We were all preoccupied, it's not really _your_ fault and we weren't sure..." Regris trailed off.

Allura shook her head again. "This may not be as urgent as the front lines, but it is .... perhaps more important for the future than the battlefields." She took a deep breath, straightening her posture. "I'll talk to Coran and make sure you have everything the Castle has to take with you by the time we're out of the wormhole, and enough storage devices to hold all of it if you do not have them with you." 

Kuviro's jaw worked in what Pidge guessed might be silence. She couldn't be too sure, now that she'd heard him hit and pass beyond the upper limits of human hearing range.

"Thank you?", he finally managed, faintly, but at a pitch slightly below dog-whistle. 

"This is - .... thank you - I don't know how we could make this up to you." Regris was more coherent, but just as slack-jawed; it was a very low bar. 

"Think nothing of it. We're here to restore _true_ peace to the universe, and giving you more to work with to rebuild after we've finally torn down the Empire is the _least_ we can do." 

********************************************

His first thought on what to do to make sense of what the lion was trying to tell him was to find context. Unfortunately, context on what had happened with Zarkon was thin on the ground without poking into places that felt like violating the privacy of the Alteans; Coran was slightly more willing to talk about it, but still avoided most of what had happened, and going through the Castle’s files and archives also meant going through things that were a part of their family and lives - not something he was going to go through without asking, and he didn’t feel like asking was a good idea yet. 

 

Meandering the Castle pondering other options in a daze, he eventually found himself in another one of the occasional circular lobbies; this one had one entrance from the rest of the Castle, but opened on to five other rooms, doors spaced out around the lobby in a configuration that felt familiar even without the symbols of the lions etched and colored into the metal over the doors. 

 

He’d suspected from the beginning that their rooms weren’t the original Paladins’ rooms; there were too many other crew quarters just like them all over the ship. Many of the other old quarters rooms he’d found had traces of previous occupants, personal effects left behind at some point and forgotten as the Castle’s population dwindled too low to clean it out or left alone out of avoidance and respect for the dead.

 

It felt likely that these room had not been opened since the last time their previous owners had entered. 

 

He scanned the different doors and took a deep breath, walking forward to the center door with the Black Lion’s symbol over it. 

 

The door wouldn’t open, giving the chime he’d learned meant there was a clearance issue with access. There weren’t many places that triggered it, mostly other people’s rooms and the few places Allura and Coran had kept locked because they hadn’t had a chance yet to make sure everything was functioning and not hazardous. 

 

Keith folded his arms, staring at it. Asking the Alteans to open it was more loaded than he felt like; he could probably ask Pidge to get it open, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted the extra company for this. 

 

He tried the door again, an idle thing to do while he pondered options. 

 

He was starting to consider trying Black's archives again, when the door behind him opened; he startled, wheeling around. 

 

Coran was in the doorway, hands raised. “I got the alert from the Castle’s computer and thought I’d check in.”

 

Keith stuffed his hands in his pockets, looking away, shifting weight; he wasn’t sure how to word this to Coran, and it took him a couple minutes, the Altean waiting by the entrance patiently but not going away.

 

“....I was - trying to figure something out.” He shuffled, turning to study the other wall. “It. Red and Black both said something about having a lot in common with Zarkon, so… I wanted to know what that meant - so I don’t end up like him.”

 

Coran’s expression softened with a distinct edge of worry and something close to pity. “Well, I suppose this can’t hurt.” He crossed the room, taking a deep breath and squaring his shoulders before he put his hand to the pad, letting the door open. 

 

Keith walked in first, cautious and jumpy; Coran followed, staying by the door, scanning the room pensively while Keith was craning to stare around it. 

 

The lights didn’t come on as bright as the rest of the Castle, and the walls were tinted a darker shade, giving it about the same sort of dim gloom Keith was used to seeing on Galra ships. The room was easily two or three times the size of the quarters they were staying in, and a little mental gauging gave him the guess all of them were like that. There were two little offshoot rooms, one with a door that closed and the other with a simple curtain of carved beads obscuring a small kitchen area. 

 

A large round bed was flush against the far wall along the curve of it, piled into a nest of dark red blankets and pillows that were still slightly disturbed, left without much care for straightening them. There was a board desk, some kind of work table, and storage cases and chests of drawers along the walls. At the foot of the bed was what looked uncannily close to a cat bed, some of the trailing blankets dripping into it.  
Strings of oddly shaped wind chimes hung in a curtain along one side of the bed, the dim light glinting off glass as Keith focused on them. 

 

The designs were familiar - pieces strung out on cords, dangling, oddly shaped solid masses coated in colored and tinted glass. 

 

_“Your mother made that before she left - said it was a good luck charm for protection or something.”_

 

The shapes were the same, although the glass was more transparent, clear enough to see what it encased; the ones his mother had left had blue-violet glass that made it difficult to tell what was inside even with holding it up to bright light and squinting. These were mostly clear, with flecks of gold, slate, crimson and grey-silver streaking through them like volcanic ash, faint red and violet tints. 

 

Each piece of glass encased a vertebra that had been engraved along the surface with bits of Galran writing and designs. He’d thought whatever dim shapes he’d seen in his mother’s chimes had looked almost like the bones he’d ended up with cleaning kills from hunting, if not shaped right for any game animal, and these would’ve been similar size and shape, although some were a little larger or smaller. 

 

He walked forward in a daze, hand running down one of the strings, catching a glass-cased bone to stare at it - the bone inside would’ve been the size of his closed fist almost. He couldn’t read what was etched into it at all, but it was definitely the same design, just not made to obscure what it was. 

 

“Old Galra custom. If one managed to kill someone who’d done enough harm to them or their family or people, they’d carve the name, what the grievances were, and some other symbols into the spine, then coat the pieces in glass like this. It had more than one meaning - kind of a trophy that you’d won, and a warning to not try whatever had earned that kind of grudge, but also something about protecting one’s own, and sometimes a little superstition about scaring off misfortune or malicious spirits.” Coran shrugged, clearly long past any twitch about the macabre angle of it.  
Keith walked down the strings, not sure what to think; it was a weird, jarring moment of connection to a history he’d been separated from, finding chimes like the ones that’d hung in the house and been moved to the shack that he’d never put much thought to like this - a ten thousand year old sparse curtain made by Zarkon before he’d become the monster they knew to strings that couldn’t have been older than he was, hanging back on Earth. 

 

He had to wonder how much the more heavily tinted glass was just a concession to avoid questions from any humans that might have visited.  
He knew the number of pieces the set at home had, but all of Zarkon’s hung lopsided, the pattern off, parts of the strings missing, at least half-there, with a few missing more than that; after a little study he could find where the cords and chains holding them together had parts detached, and he reached up to run a hand along the place where pieces were missing. Besides the mild lack of care given to the bed, everything else in the room was neat and well kept, making damage to something like this stick out even more.

 

“Hm?” Coran leaned in from the door, trying to get a better look at what had Keith’s attention. He finally grimaced and straightened into resignation, walking in to look up over Keith’s shoulder. 

 

Keith didn’t look over, hand still on the cord. “There’s pieces missing.”

 

“Oh! Yes.” Coran shifted, running a hand along his moustache. “Usually chimes like these would stay in living quarters. The other half of most of these was back on the homeworld… and if someone held in close enough regard wasn’t living with the person who made them - particularly if they’d been connected to or a target of whatever happened to begin with - then they’d make a gift of a string with a couple of the pieces, as a sort of protective thing and a gesture of closeness.” Coran was studying the bones in front of them, distantly thoughtful. “....well. I would’ve thought he would’ve left most of this one back on Daibazaal.”

 

Keith finally looked away from it, and Coran sighed. 

 

“Zarkon’s father. The other missing string was back on Altea, in Alfor’s room.” 

 

Coran did not sound impressed with Zarkon’s father, nor like there were any mixed feelings at all about the man’s spinal cord being strung up as some kind of ritual warning. It was enough to briefly distract Keith from pondering his mother’s part in things, as he raised a questioning eyebrow at Coran.

 

Coran looked from Keith to the charm. “…His father was a self-centered, egotistical, bigoted, self-serving mess that half left their homeworld in shambles and had a habit of playing their allies and his own people for his own benefit. Some of his under-the-table politics nearly got Alfor killed a few times, back before the treaties, but since they weren’t supposed to know each other and proof was shaky, Zarkon couldn’t get solid grounds to challenge his right to rule until some unrest on Daibazaal nearly turned into a civil war and he started attacking his own civilians.” 

 

Knowing what Zarkon had turned into made it surreal to hear; there had been a time when Zarkon had been willing to overthrow his own father for crossing moral lines - 

 

A time when Zarkon had considered the Castle a part of his home, and been close enough to Alfor for gestures that were apparently major ones.  
“So…” He turned his attention back to the strings of bone in glass, the echo that seemed to cement his parents’ old place on Earth to the history of the Galra. “…These are pretty important?”

 

“Well…yes?” Coran was watching him uncertainly.

 

He wasn’t sure if the custom would even be the same exactly after ten thousand years, but…. “What…would it mean if - someone left a full set somewhere? Hung it up and never came back?”

 

The uncertainty went more cautiously concerned. “….Well, a whole set would stay at home. There wouldn’t be many reasons to abandon it.” Coran stepped back, shifting weight and thinking, frowning at the floor. “I can’t think of many accounts of that, besides… eeehhh… well, no, there are stories with that in them, real and otherwise, but - it’s almost always a warrior leaving a mark of protection with their home and family to go on some long campaign.”

 

Home. 

 

He ran a hand through the strings again, setting the glass to quiet chiming clinks. “…Remember when you said that I would know if the Galra came to Earth?”

 

Coran stayed quiet, but was listening.

 

“…There was a full set of chimes like this at home. Dad said - that Mom had made them, before she left, and they were some kind of luck charm.” He held one of the lower pieces, studying the marks carved into the bone under the glass. “He said he’d tell me the whole story when I was older, but…” 

 

Coran edged closer, uncertainly hovering; Keith fumbled for his phone, tucked away in his belt, and went digging through photo albums, looking for one album that he usually avoided.

There hadn't been much left of his mother. There'd been some clothes that survived - incredibly mundane, besides the vague hint that she'd been at least as tall as his dad, probably taller. There were pictures of the knife, sitting on a table and in his hands, the glyph glowing.

And the chimes, tinted glass with a twisted, rough metal charm at the bottom. 

None of the photos gave any hint that it was possible to see what might be carved on whatever the glass was formed around, but he did have a couple clear pictures of the odd piece of twisted metal at the bottom, something he'd always thought was random scrap metal found somewhere.

Now it felt like a clue that'd been staring him in the face all along; one of the strange alloys the Galra used in some of their gear, with distorted bits of Galran writing on it.  
The bottom of the string of chimes was the Imperial equivalent of a dogtag, damaged and twisted to be less easily identifiable.

"...Can you read it?" Coran had talked about working with Galra and was too familiar to not be able to understand Galran, and if they'd been working with the Galra military before it became the Empire it was now - 

Coran worried at his moustache, squinting at the zoomed in picture. "Let's see... I don't think it's a high command? That's a unit symbol, and the title could be either intel, combat pilot specialist, or a cook, I'm not quite sure." The Altean shrugged, standing back straight. "They've changed all their markers around since the old days." 

He wasn't sure what he'd expected. The Blade would definitely be able to read it, but with how avoidant they were of anything to do with his mother, he wasn't sure he'd get an answer if he tried.

But then, maybe the details of who and what they were weren't the important part right now. The Empire _had_ been snooping around Earth, and she'd killed whatever they'd sent. She was probably the reason it'd taken them so long to come in force, and going by some of the scribbled notes he'd found hidden, she'd known the Blue Lion was there. 

And at some point, it'd been "Home". 

Coran put a hand on his shoulder, and Keith shook his head, trying to drag back to the present; he'd come here for a reason, and he was in front of something that'd belonged to _Zarkon_ , the Black Paladin, not the immortal undead monstrosity of an Emperor. 

"...So how bad did it get with Zarkon's father, really?" Coran had mentioned a short form, but it felt like the tip of the iceberg. 

Coran inhaled and whistled, half counting off on his fingers. "Well. He was conniving, underhanded, and he and his were living in luxury at the expense of their people. He was working with some outside threats to keep things destabilized, getting kickbacks from them and using it to his advantage, but we didn't have solid proof Zarkon could use until after Zarkon had taken the throne. He was working to bring slavery back into the Galra Empire, and he'd mismanaged their own people so badly that some existing factional splits turned ugly, and there were open wars between different outlying factions and chaos. He also mismanaged Daibazaal into some of the worst conditions in a long time, and responded to protests and riots by indiscriminately blockading districts and entire cities, firing on his own civilians...that was when Zarkon managed to push back enough to challenge him for the throne and take over." Coran paused. "Really, his attempts at getting Alfor killed, nevermind anyone he _knew_ was friendly with Zarkon that wasn't under his control, were a flibdebloop next to a weblum." 

Considering what Zarkon himself had turned into, it was both painful irony and a little terrifying how Zarkon had gone from an outraged challenge to becoming what he'd hated.  
Keith ran a hand down the string of chimes one last time, finally pulling his attention away from them and the mess of everything they represented about Zarkon and his own family to the rest of the room. 

There was some kind of skull hanging on the wall that had four eye sockets, horns, and too many teeth; Keith had barely looked at it when Coran said "hunting trophy" with a shrug.

Besides that, there were a number of other oddities - carvings, woven pieces, art objects, jewelry, strings of beads, and things that didn't all look Galran; Keith walked around the room, barely brushing fingers over them.

"Those were mostly gifts - things from various civilizations and groups they'd helped or arranged treaties with. Sometimes it'd been tokens exchanged." Coran was going quieter; as much as Keith wanted to know more, he also knew he didn't want to drag Coran through it much longer there. 

One last thing caught Keith's eye; two small pedestals sitting on a shelf beside the bed. They looked empty, but Keith recognized them by now as the little hologram projectors that were scattered around the Castle, the equivalent of picture frames; he'd seen one in Allura's room, once, with the image of her parents. 

He brushed his hand over the first one to wake it up; there were five figures, only two of which he recognized, all out of armor and in what looked like different variations on casual clothes. Zarkon was in the center, filled out and healthy, giving the "camera" an awkward half-smile like he had just realized it was there. Alfor was leaning into his side with a grin, Zarkon's hand on his shoulder. He'd never realized Alfor had been the shortest of the old Paladins before - the Altean King would've been tall by human standards and that seemed to follow for Alteans normally, but everyone else was at least a few inches taller. The grinning sharklike figure leaning on Zarkon's other side casually looked just enough like some of the odd drawings of the "Sky Warrior" he'd chased to be recognizable; he'd never seen anyone that looked like him or the other two.

In context, it _hurt_ to look at, and he only had a few fragments of Alfor's memory and the outline of the story. The fact that he'd never seen anyone of the other species there, even among rebel groups or slave populations, was more chilling. 

The second pedestal was Zarkon, looking much more composed and content, in ceremonial armor, with an Altean woman at his side. It took Keith a moment to recognize that he'd caught a glimpse of her in one of Alfor's memories, in the hangar where the lions were being built. She was smiling, reaching up to weave her fingers into Zarkon's hand on her shoulder, in something that looked equally formal by Altean standards.

It felt like the key to everything and a sign of how little he knew about what had happened; the Black Lion was quiet, gravely pensive.

Coran had also fallen quiet, pointedly turned to look anywhere but at the little hologram pedestals; Keith reached back to pass a hand over them to turn them off.

"...Sorry about this. And ... thanks for explaining things." 

"It's nothing." Coran still wasn't looking up, distracted and auto-piloting the words. 

Keith nudged his arm on the way to the door, startling the Altean, but Coran made some sort of quiet low hum and followed him out, mumbling some excuse to leave before peeling off; Keith stared after for a while, but let him go.

He stayed in the central room in silence for a few long minutes, looking back at the door to Zarkon's room, before he headed off himself toward the training bay. He had far too much to process, now, and could use a few rounds with the Gladiator to clear his head to even try to make sense of it all.


	3. Burnt It Down And Now I'm Looking Over My Shoulder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiro runs into some of the problems with being a disembodied fledgling semi-divine being, and Keith ends up hovering over "Shiro" when he arrives a bedraggled and half-dead mess, leaving half of the team unsure of where they stand.
> 
> Meanwhile, Lotor is considering the reminder that the clock is ticking against him.

The attack on Central Command had taken out most of the oldest Druids; there were only a few left that dated back to the beginning of the Empire. 

Hepta was stuck with one of them.

The outpost usually had a handful of somewhat older ones present and involved in research; the now-eldest had been making a periodic visit to adjust and add to certain experimental systems, then had just... never been called back. The High Priestess had been in contact, enough to make it clear that it was an intentional decision, as some of their work was now upgraded to a central part of her strategy. 

He wasn't sure what the creature had once been; the older Druids became, the less remained of whatever they'd been before conversion. He had a strong suspicion it hadn't been Galra; the work it did had roots somewhere else, foreign to the Empire. 

The workroom it had taken over was dark, even by Galra standards, the only light coming from sets of odd canisters set in monitoring devices, clear fluid filled with motes of colored light that curled and drifted. The Druid was a shadowy shape, hunched over one of them with a spread of screens and other devices, a thin tube running from it to a smaller nearby holding canister. 

Energetic imprints, impressions made from the energy the High Priestess had managed to pull from Voltron using the Komar; jumbled bits of memories. In between its efforts at rendering the imprints taken from the human Black Paladin, it had spent many quintants hovering over them, sifting through the mess for every shred of intelligence it could gain.

"You said you had a copy stable enough to integrate into the previous record?" 

It didn't acknowledge him at first. It could be daunting, approaching the creatures, but the older ones tended to be less volatile than the younger ones; more settled and focused, less distractable. 

There was a flicker of white in the dim as the hood turned just enough to see part of the mask. It spoke in a thin rasp, the scraped-out and desiccated remains of a voice. "Yes." It turned slowly back to its work, thin hands hovering over a screen in a last check. "There will be confusion, but no more than can be easily explained away by other conditions." Parts connecting the smaller canister to the larger device dimmed, and the Druid carefully, deliberately turned the smaller canister and lifted it out of the joint with a faint hiss from the seals as it disconnected. 

It drifted to where he stood in the door, at his eye level only because it seemed to have forgotten how to walk normally long ago; whatever it had been was shorter than most Galra. "If you have a viable subject that has retained stability with the grafted memories, then it will have enough memory of the time between his escape and the battle to pass." 

Its tone and affect were flat, with only the very faintest flicker of cautious irritation. 

"We do." It had taken a ridiculous amount of time, but they'd managed. The first problem with trying to set up a sleeper clone was just getting the memories grafted without enough energetic rejection problems for the clone's energy system to collapse and take out higher brain function with it. The second problem was that, even with grafted memories, the clone never managed to be entirely consistent to the original behaviorally; even though they'd put a great deal of effort into trying to solve that problem with Project Kuron, he knew they were partly relying on the circumstances providing an "easier" explanation for "Shiro" to be acting slightly off. 

Besides, from what they'd been able to glean from comparing the previous copied memories to the fragments the High Priestess had salvaged, it wasn't like most of their group would even know him well enough to notice; only one of them had any real familiarity before the Lions had come into play, and the High Priestess seemed certain that the situation would pressure him into either second-guessing himself or otherwise not giving away the game too early. 

He waited long enough to be sure the Druid had no other input, then turned, to return to the project with the creature and its prize accompanying. 

....................................................................

Keith had been sleeping restlessly at best, going down a list of things trying to get around lying awake at night restlessly. He'd tried wearing himself out on the Gladiator until he was utterly exhausted, he'd tried old mental exercises he'd learned as a teenager that didn't seem to work so well anymore, he'd tried finding odd quiet places in the Castle that wouldn't jar his memory, he'd even tried some kind of Altean tea Coran had sworn would help with insomnia.

That last one did seem like it'd come the closest, but he recognized the disoriented, disconnected feeling of hitting the point where he SHOULD be asleep to some kind of sleep aid but had somehow managed to stay awake through it. What sleep he had gotten had been a blur of bizarre dreams that left him struggling to remember them in the morning, with nothing to show for it.

He'd been uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping in the Black Lion the way he'd done before with Red, but sleeplessness was wearing on him enough that he came into the hangar with a thermos of the Altean tea.

If he was going to keep up with everything, he'd need to sleep sometime.

The lion was already moving to let him in, doing the mental equivalent of trying to nudge him in with a paw, fondly exasperated with his stubbornness. 

Even with the way he'd been working with the lion so far, there was still the lingering feeling that Shiro should be there; like he'd walk into the cockpit and find Shiro sitting in the seat or sprawled in the hammock as if nothing had happened.

The pilot's seat was empty, the hammock stowed in a cabinet built into the bulkhead near the floor. 

Keith set it up in silence, attaching the magnetic anchors to the walls in the back of the cockpit, then settled into it with a blanket and the thermos of tea. 

Even with a bit of almost drunken restlessness from the tea dueling with his jags of insomnia, he managed to drift off, the Black Lion's presence curled around him until it was like leaning back to float in a pool of stars.

He heard something garbled - Shiro's voice, but it was distant, echoing, layered over like fifty different conversations coming from fifty different directions, points off in the sea of stardust. Shiro was out there - somewhere - but it was impossible to tell which direction he should be going; any one of them could be the right way, or the wrong way.

Or both.

He floundered, trying to chase the voices when he wasn't even sure he could single one out of the overlapping, muffled background.

He was in the hangar on Sendak's ship, surrounded by armed Galra - unrestrained and with none of them making a move to hinder him; Jupiter's great red storm hung in the background, outside the force field that kept the hangar habitable. 

He was there of his own free will, a desperate bargain with no other options.

He caught one of the thin echoes - "Goddamnit Keith, what are you even _doing_ -"

As soon as his attention focused on it, the image vanished.

 ~~Matt~~ The human they'd rescued was racing down the hall next to him, swearing a red streak at the ominous beeping from his hastily borrowed wrist-computer as Central Command's alarms started to go off, a moment before there was more swearing from the rest of their team. They were prepared enough that he had covering fire as he darted ahead, closing distance with his blade while the others laid down fire; they were close to their objective, they just needed to find the other human and get out.

None of them expected to see one of the sentries and two of the guards get taken out from behind by an Imperial researcher, with a rank insignia he'd only seen in some of their documentation, always highlighted as time to get out of dodge - one of the Druids' assistants. 

~~Ulaz~~ The lanky Galra was giving them a frustrated glare over the face mask, that turned into even more frustrated resignation after he visibly noted Matt's presence.

"You're all idiots, and I don't think I want to know what you think passes for an escape plan."

He had the door to the cell open, and from within was another burst of confusion - "What's going on out there - Matt?!"

Dimly, from somewhere else, Keith heard Shiro yell his name, and Imperial Central Command vanished.

He was in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, holding a hunting rifle on a particularly fluffy Galra that had both hands up, no armor, and an expression of bafflement, while another that'd just tackled Matt stared at him slack-jawed, Pidge clinging to the second Galra's back.

"Keith..." Even with it faint and hollow, he knew the quiet migraine-face tone Shiro took when he was doing something particularly stupid that Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

Things started to turn into a more dizzying blur.

He was tailing a battlecruiser that'd suddenly broken its normal route, heading at top speed toward his father's homeworld.

His parents were waiting on the landing field, his mother burying her face in her hands and his father trying not to laugh after he'd added a couple extra loops and a low pass over the instructor on the ground to his practice routine, buildings a mix of human steel and gleaming Altean white curving up around the spaceport.

Pidge had just given a yell of angry triumph, pulling a clay and sand crusted, distinctly alien rifle out of the scrub and underbrush near the canyon; there wasn't another living soul for miles that either of them knew of.

There was a campfire in the woods and he was fuzzy-headed and half-dead, trying to parse the strange trio across the camp that was cooing over and feeding the dragonling he'd just almost died carrying across the border.

He could hear his social worker yelling at the Garrison officers before the door even opened, Iverson slinking in sheepishly behind her as she stormed in; it was the last thing he'd expected after so many nightmares of vivisection. 

The blurring got worse, flickers of images and scenes too fast to pick anything out, bits and flickers of Shiro's voice he couldn't make out. 

Eventually, he woke up. He felt more exhausted than if he hadn't slept, his stomach lurching like he'd just tried to ride every thrill ride at Six Flags at once with fluctuating gravity, and he just stayed sprawled in the hammock with limbs dangling over the edge haphazardly and his blanket tangled around him.

The Black Lion was tugging and gently nudging, pulling him carefully towards something more stable and grounded, but even while it was trying to be soothing, he could feel an exasperated thousand-yard stare underlying it.

When he stopped feeling like the cockpit was spinning and tilting despite being perfectly still, he crawled out of the hammock, and shambled off to find something more calming and restful.

Like, maybe flying one of the Castle's pods straight at Lotor's cruiser, or inviting the Druids out drinking.

.....................................................................

To say that Shiro was frustrated would be an understatement. 

The Black Lion, meanwhile, was slowly getting past a nearly palpable urge to paste a malformed 'an attempt was made' gold star sticker to his face, and had concluded that in spite of that, he whole thing was hilarious.

The lines were all still there, he was still connected to everyone, it _should_ have been easy to try to get something across to Keith. 

Unfortunately, he was aware of five hundred things he wanted to try to get across to Keith, and he could either focus on _which one_ went to which Keith, or trying to shove it Keith's direction. Even focusing on shoving things Keith's direction was harder than it should have been, like trying to stuff fifty liters of mayonnaise through a one-milliliter oral syringe.

The most disconcerting part was the creeping realization that it took real thought to figure out which of the infinite possibilities was 'his', and even that was a mix of being able to rule out the ones where he was physically present in material normal reality and some sort of weird taste-sense-feeling of what seemed 'right' to try to narrow the list down of the ones where he _wasn't_.

The lion wasn't entirely helping, since its impression was that all of them were 'his' simultaneously, he was just blundering around like a child jumping up to look over countertops. 

Still, there was an impression of sympathetic paws on his shoulders; it really _was_ difficult to communicate with tiny, squishy mortal things. 

.....................................................................

There were times Shiro wasn't sure how he'd managed to survive.

The atmosphere on whatever planet the battlecruiser had been orbiting was breathable; he'd chalk that up to the almost unnatural luck, except he was sure it had more to do with the Galra stopping around habitable worlds. There was probably a base or outpost somewhere else on the planet. He wasn't sure if he hoped it was far away, so that he could avoid risking getting caught yet again, or if he hoped it was close, so that he'd have better chances of being able to steal a ship.

Probably the latter. He was pretty sure he should've been able to at least feel the connection to the Black Lion somewhere in there, but there was no trace of it that he could pick up on, and right now he was choosing to believe that it was because he was just that thoroughly far away.

If he couldn't pick up on the lion, then the lion would probably have difficulty finding him, so he'd need to find _some_ way to either get communications out, or get a ship and make a break for it to get back in touch with his team. He had no way of telling how long he'd been separated, but the Galra'd had time to go back to work on him, and that meant it was well past too long. He knew they were all capable, and _should_ be out there and still active, but it didn't stop him worrying.

Even if they were fine, there was no telling what else they were up against, and if they couldn't get the Black Lion moving...

No, the lion knew to grab Keith, and was more than intelligent enough to grab Keith if they were separated long enough for it to put the team at risk.

The small fire was barely enough to keep him from freezing, and left him working out a list of survival priorities; in order to get back to the others, he needed to get to whatever might be built on this planet to get a ship. In order to do that, he needed to stay alive long enough to search for clues. In order to do that, he'd need to find better shelter if he had to spend another night, food, and water. He was getting by melting snow at the fire, but it was slow going without anything to melt it in, getting sips and gulps here and there from what he could keep in his hands.

When they'd gone through survival training, while they were coached on adapting to unknown alien environments as a hypothetical, it had always been the pipe dream half-joke. The main reason for it was in case of something going wrong on a return trip and ending up stranded somewhere on Earth; nobody had taken the idea of getting out of their solar system, much less to another habitable planet, seriously.

And now, here he was, huddled under the skeleton of some kind of megafauna, with a small fire scraped together from some dead scrub he'd managed to dig out, so far from Earth that he wasn't even sure the Milky Way would be visible as a speck somewhere in the stars, too cold and exhausted to really appreciate it. 

Before the Galra, he'd had a tally list of different bodies in the solar system he'd been to; Mars, Phobos and Deimos, Callisto, Ganymede, Adrastea, five of Saturn's myriad little satellites, Ariel, Triton, slowly creeping outward.

It was something he'd been proud of; even if he accomplished nothing else, even if he had to get it done faster than anyone else, he was going to be the pilot that pushed the boundaries to the very limit of the solar system. He'd been far enough for Earth to be nothing but a glimmering blue speck.

It was entirely possible that the Milky Way itself wasn't even visible from where he was now. 

Before, he was going to defy his illness and be one of the first people to the limits of the solar system even if it killed him.

Now, after everything he'd been through, after surviving working with god-beasts to bring down a ten thousand year old immortal tyrant, he wasn't going to let anything as petty as cold or dehydration to stop him.

......................................................

The Black Lion was having strange distracted moments. It was a new development, as if there were something the lion was considering and weighing options on, but Keith couldn't get any kind of answer from it on exactly what had it occasionally seeming elsewhere - the first few times it happened, the lion turned into the best reminder of minor upkeep, meals, and routines he'd ever had, as if changing the subject. 

The games of tag with Lotor and the rest of the Galra fleet were getting more frequent with less clear to show for it; skirmishes holding places they'd already driven the Empire out of, feints and prods. It was almost like Lotor was just trying to keep them running in circles and irritated more than actually accomplishing anything. 

They had just cleared another feint and driven off another cruiser when something showed up on his radar suddenly, a violet marker that wasn't the Black Lion itself, the lion's attention fixated that direction as whatever internal debate the lion had been having resolved sharply and with a strong sense of urgency. 

It had to be something to do with Shiro.

"I've got something on coordinates and I need a wormhole - it might be Shiro." 

........................................................

The fighter at the coordinates the lion was drawn to was dead in the metaphorical water, drifting out of power and with all systems failing - they were never meant to go far from the battlecruiser, and this one had apparently been trying to chase them across the galaxy without a teludav or hyperspace drive.

Definitely a Shiro kind of stunt to pull.

He caught the fighter gently in the lion's jaws, bringing it into the hangar and setting it down gently on the floor. He was already out of the pilot seat once it touched ground, heading for the exit as the lion moved to let him out. He was already scaling the fighter to get to the latches as Allura and Pidge bolted into the hangar, the others trailing behind. 

It disengaged partly on commands from the inside, with a waft of stale air.

Shiro was a mess; pale, dark circles under his eyes, hair grown out, scruff where he hadn't been able to shave, and he almost fell out of the fighter trying to climb out of it. Keith darted to catch him, half off-balance himself, and Allura had to step in to help both of them down and get them stably on the solid deck. 

"Found me... been trying to catch you for days..." 

"Yeah, we've got you." Keith had one side and Allura had taken Shiro's other side.

She probably could've carried him by herself. "In that little pile of scrap?" 

Shiro gave a weak half-laugh. "Well, it worked." 

Allura groaned. 

Shiro being that cavalier about his own health and safety was nerve-wracking and entirely like him enough to be a comfort to Keith even as it frazzled Keith's nerves further. Of course Shiro had no survival instinct and was willing to do something courageous, low-odds, and idiotic to try to get back to them.

Pidge was hovering close to one side - really everyone was hovering, Hunk a little behind Keith, Lance popping up behind him and trying to worm in, Coran following along close behind, and there was a chaotic mess of chatter. 

"Where were you? We had nothing to go on after you disappeared..."

"Are you injured? We've been working on the medbay-"

"Wait if you were in that for days then you haven't eaten - we have real food - but we should get you soup or something...."

"Are you okay? It wasn't the Galra again was it?"

"Alright, that's enough!" Keith couldn't really try to look imposing when he was helping carry Shiro, who was barely able to keep his feet, but it was enough to get everyone else backing off, even though it didn't seem to be bothering Shiro. "Hunk, Coran, see about getting that broth and some water. We can all bug him with questions _after_ he's had a chance to recover." 

There were a few quiet distressed noises and they still hovered some, but they gave Keith space to get to Shiro's quarters. 

Keith's worst worries came from how Shiro was dressed. He well recognized the Galran slave garb, and what it meant; the Lion had no clear answer when he sent it a bitter, angry jab about its insistence Shiro would be fine, just a sort of weird thoughtful silence. 

"...Are you alright?" Keith knew it was a rhetorical question, but still felt the need to say something while helping Shiro to his room.

"'m fine now," was the mumbled answer, with a weak, lopsided attempt at a grin.

He shot Shiro a dim look of disbelief; it was obvious there were a list of reasons Shiro wasn't actually 'okay', no matter how much getting back to the Castle and safety had to be a relief. It was hard to tell if Shiro was ignoring it intentionally or just too out of it to notice, so Keith sighed and let it drop. There'd be time to find out what they had to worry about later, and Shiro never had been one for advertising when something was wrong.

When they got to the room, Keith helped Shiro to the bed, where he slumped sitting, leaning against the back wall. He was breathing normally, but seemed to go half-asleep the second he had a place to rest. Keith managed to get him awake long enough to get him to drink water, which disappeared fast, but Shiro dropped off quickly again soon after.

Keith hovered around the room for a few hours, keeping an eye on Shiro and fussing at cleaning what there was to clean, finding some of Shiro's things hanging around, and trying not to worry himself in circles. Shiro had seemed less disoriented and more active and good-humored than he'd been the last time he'd escaped the Galra, which Keith almost wanted to take as a good sign, except that for Shiro to've chased them down like that, he had to've escaped ahead of when they found him - 

And he knew how much of a habit Shiro had of masking and acting fine, until it had gotten so ridiculously bad that even he couldn't play it off, even if something was nagging at him, a gnawing dread he was afraid to pay too much attention to that something was deeply wrong.

The best he could do now was just stick close and be there if Shiro needed anything, and let Shiro rest, so he tried to focus on just finding small constructive things to do until Shiro woke up. 

When Hunk and Lance showed up at the door with soup, Keith took it and had a dumbfounded moment as there was an internal war between knowing that Shiro needed to eat and knowing that Shiro needed to sleep. He also didn't move from the doorway while having that internal conflict, which left Lance and Hunk peering around him trying to check on Shiro and having their own visible war of concern.

After a minute of that, Hunk shrugged and made a half-questioning noise to Lance, who returned it, and they left Keith to his vigil.

The soup was still warm and he wasn't sure how edible it would be if it got cold, so he set it down on one of the shelves and edged over to the bed, nudging Shiro's good shoulder carefully, tensed to get out of the way if Shiro woke up swinging.

Shiro did flinch, then there were a couple muzzy groaning sleep-noises while Shiro stared at him blearily, squinting like Keith being there was somehow not computing.

Keith picked up the bowl and held it out. "Hunk made soup."

Shiro raised an eyebrow, another couple seconds of waking up passing as he processed that. He still accepted the bowl, a quizzical stare at it passing into more awake recognition at the warmth. 

"...Oh! ... there's. Food?" 

The disorientation was almost comforting in a weird way; if Shiro was acting like everything was fine, he'd have things more together. "Yeah. Now that we've got more allies and room to breathe, we've actually been able to get supplies."

Shiro considered the bowl with a wide-eyed nod, then settled sitting on the bed, draining the bowl; judging by the condition of the fighter, he likely hadn't eaten in almost a week.

Keith ended up making a couple trips back to get more of the broth and water, interruptions on his hovering; he needed to have Words with the lion, but that would wait until Shiro was up and on his feet again. 

........................................................

After Keith had herded Shiro to his room, there was a hum of activity for a while, but it eventually scattered. Hunk retreated to the kitchen with Coran to work on food that would sit well with someone who hadn't had a solid meal in a while, Pidge threw herself into her search for her family to keep herself busy, and Lance rattled in a circle before finally wandering into the kitchen to 'see if Hunk needed a hand'. 

Allura sat in the hangar, pacing once the others left, Chuchule scrambling up her leg and climbing to her shoulder.

It was an immense relief to have Shiro back and relatively intact; an opportunity for things to go back to what passed for normal on the Castle.

And that was the part that was also terrifying, in a way that had her feeling immensely guilty.

Shiro would recover and return to his rightful place in the Black Lion, and then...

The lions would probably return to their preferred Paladins. Red would take Keith back, and Lance would be back with Blue. She knew Lance had missed Blue, even if he was getting along alright with Red, and Keith had been ill at ease with the Black Lion and the leadership that came with it from the beginning. 

She would return to piloting the Castle primarily and acting as background support, just when she'd been getting used to being a Paladin.

The Blue Lion kept nudging into the back of her mind, trying to be comforting even while whatever it was trying to convey was tangling up in ways that she couldn't decipher, made worse by the impression some of it was things the Lion was trying to avoid sharing while others were things the Lion didn't actually know about yet. 

Chuchule had her own worried nudge. "You know brooding doesn't do anything but make you feel worse, right?"

She sighed, shoulders slumping. "I know. It's just..." She raised a hand, a weak gesture that had been an attempt at carrying herself with more certainty. "I'm not sure what to do. I should just be happy to have him back, and yet... I know it's selfish of me, and not my decision to begin with, but I still want to be a Paladin."

Back to waiting on the Castle with little more to do than make calls and pray everything worked out when the others went out on missions. Back to watching every battle wishing there was more she could do.

The lion was tugging on her again.

She headed toward the hangar, lingering occasionally in the halls of the Castle. She wanted to spend as much time as she could with the lion, to make the most of whatever time she had left as a paladin, and at the same time, it hurt to go back to the hangar knowing there would likely be a day all too soon when it wasn't "her" hangar anymore. 

Chuchule nestled in against her neck, and Blue was watching her with a strange sort of long-suffering bemusement.

She reached the hangar and stood in front of the lion. They'd been there before she was born, a presence that had been a normal part of her life from the beginning. Even with that familiarity, she wasn't sure she'd ever really noticed how large they were, both physically towering over the hangars and as a larger presence, filling the space around them. 

She felt very small, staring up at Blue.

"I suppose you'll be glad to have Lance back. Ancestors know I've been fumbling more than we can afford."

The response was the strong impression of a snort and an eyeroll, with any actual comment withheld.

"I am not going to supplant Lance's place on this team - particularly not when I know how much I could do with the Castle that no-one else can." 

The lion gave a bemused rumble, nudging her again mentally, to wait and see. 

"...Wait for what? Shiro's returned, Keith will be returning to the Red Lion, and Lance _should_ be with you." 

Blue moved, massive head angling down and tilting at her. She mentally poked it back, prodding for some kind of actual answer.

They knew what they were doing and she was being needlessly melodramatic.

She shot Blue a dim glare. "And what, praytell, are you doing?"

The smug impression that the lion knew something and wouldn't tell had her wanting to kick it. The creeping realization that the lion did not actually have the answers despite being sure of something had her wanting to kick it even more. 

She was seriously considering walking over and giving the lion's paw a swift and ineffectual kick, just to make herself feel better, when the door to the hangar opened, startling her; she jumped back away from it with a muffled yell.

Lance stood in the entrance, eyes wide, frozen at first.

"Uh. Whoops, wrong hangar!" He turned on one heel.

It wouldn't be the wrong hangar for very long. "No - it's alright, you just startled me-"

"Well, yeah, but I guess I just wasn't thinking, Hunk kicked me out of the kitchen and I started wandering and, you know, old habit-" He was shifting awkwardly and a very poor liar.

"This _was_ your hangar first, and it likely will be again." 

The hangar went dead silent, Lance's posture sinking as his expression fell.

"I'm not kicking you out. You've been better at this than I ever was." 

Allura blinked a few times, Lance's two sentences refusing to coalesce out of pieces that didn't fit together. "What?"

He shoved his hands in his pockets, shuffling his feet in place. "You're a better Paladin than I ever was. You caught up on things Blue could do in a few days that took me months, you're a great diplomat, you actually know what's going on in the universe and all - you should be the Blue Paladin, not me."

"Absolute nonsense." None of it fit together at all, it was wrong, and she was going to make it right if she had to shake him. "You were the one the lion first chose, and you were the one to awaken the lion from ten thousand years of slumber - and besides, this is your team, your people, I've only known any of you for maybe a decaphoeb. If anyone is going to step down, it should be me." 

The lion was starting to drift more into long-suffering bemused frustration, and from the quizzical way Lance glanced up at her, he'd picked up on it as well.

She shook her head, folding her arms and straightening her posture. "Besides, it isn't up to either of us in the end. Once Shiro is recovered enough, it will be up to the Lions to decide again, and I am sure the Blue Lion will know the best choice to do what needs to be done." 

She was the backup that hadn't been originally meant to be a Paladin, after all.

There was another mental eyeroll from the lion.

Chuchule peeked up around her collar uncertainly. "...Maybe we should listen to the lion and just go on until they decide what to do?"

She could feel that half of it was just Chuchule wanting them to stop half-arguing over who really didn't belong, but the mouse did have a point that they were running in pointless circles until the lions made their decisions. 

"Let's just ... see what they want when Shiro's recovered."

Lance half-opened his mouth, squinting between her and the lion, then shifted back a half-step. "...Yeah, I guess that's." He shot the lion another confused look. "All we can do at this point."

...........................................................

The awkward silence grew until they'd both come up with transparent excuses to be somewhere else. Lance just had the faint relief that Allura hadn't even questioned 'I need to go floss my weasel' after he'd had another moment of completely blanking on anything that would actually make sense and blurted out one of his older sister's list of nonsense excuses that had usually been delivered with much more sarcasm when she'd said them.

One day he was going to have to explain it, and he did not look forward to that day. Then again, maybe he'd get lucky and it'd turn out that 'polishing the creznat' was just as much gibberish and nonsense as his excuse had been.

He meant to go just about anywhere that he wouldn't run into someone else.

That turned into the Red Lion's hangar. It half worked; it was unlikely anyone else would go there right now. 

It also half didn't work, because the Red Lion counted as a Someone Else, and the long-suffering low level frustration was almost palpable in the hangar. 

"....I can go, if you really don't want me here right now, I know you'd probably rather have Keith and all-"

If the lion could've picked him up by the scruff of his neck, it would have, and he could almost feel teeth on the back of his neck trying to scoop him up.

He stared up at the lion with several gibberish hand gestures and the incredibly articulate response of "....Uh."

There was a grumpy warmth curling around him and refusing to either budge or explain.

"...Okay then."

He turned, considering going to get a shower, then back to the hangar since the Lion seemed to be kind of insistent. Then almost out to go spend time in the pool, but the lion was doing the grouchy mental-gnawing thing.

He finally settled for wandering into the cockpit, to sit and stare in bewilderment at the consoles in the hopes the lions would start making sense.

All he was getting from Red for maybe ten minutes was a sense of a huge warm bulk curled around him grumpily and the lion feeling fussy. 

There was also the strange sense the lion was having deja vu.

"What, did Keith not know what he was doing with any of this?"

Red had a considering pause that held both 'yes' and 'no', and some odd feeling that wasn't the Lion - a sort of desperate clinging to any sense of purpose, hanging on to whatever was there like someone adrift in space clinging to the first solid object to drift by.

Even if he'd seen Keith rattled before, the desperate uncertainty was a strange image to connect there; Keith was always so self-assured and driven.

It also wasn't anything like the odd nostalgia vibe he'd gotten from the lion, which brought up an even harder mental image to connect - King Alfor, unsure of what he was doing and how he got where he was, Alfor with the sense that all the responsibility that'd landed on him was some sort of mistake.

There was a flicker of something - nervous, cracked laughter;" _As if I'm even going to pass the ordeal._ " - 

" _"Do you really think the ancestors would let me anywhere near authority? I'm useless most of the time._ "

It sounded much younger than anything he'd heard or seen of Alfor before, distant and disconnected, like a recording copied a few too many times.

"This is nothing like that and you know it. I'm not - some kind of magic alien elf royalty or anything, I'm a _farmboy_ from Cuba! I'm not even sure how I got into the Garrison some days." 

If the lion were a physical cat, he was pretty sure she'd have just flopped on him gently holding his head in her mouth in frustration.

He'd gotten used to the idea that Alfor, when he was younger, had gotten into stupid shenanigans; everyone had off days and if Alfor was intent on going off having adventures, shit would happen. Alfor was someone who'd always belonged in the stars doing heroics.

Lance had just sort of walked into it blindly poking sticks at things and following other people - Pidge, Shiro, Allura, even Keith somehow. Sooner or later, his luck was going to run out, or it'd otherwise resolve sooner.

After all, Shiro was back, which meant that when he recovered he'd go back to Black, Allura was doing amazingly with Blue and Lance wouldn't even try to edge in there, and Keith.... even if he was clinging to any sense of purpose the way Red said he was, Keith still had more of a clue what he was doing as the Red Paladin than Lance did.

Red's frustration didn't fade, but whatever was going on wasn't translating beyond a snarled tangle of "things not being as simple as they sound", so the lion just settled for more of the sense of grouchy flopping on him. 

.............................................................

Keith hadn't even really considered going to check with Red. Lance was possibly doing better at it than he had - people skills were a thing usually needed for a second in command position.

Besides, the status of the team positions was low on his priorities as he stormed into the Black Lion's hangar, stopping within arm's reach in front of it to glare up at the massive creature.

"You told me you had things under control, what part of him ending up with the Galra again is 'under control' and 'will be okay'?!"

The response was the sense of a deep mental sigh.

"Don't you sigh at me! I trusted you to look after him!" He pointed back out the hangar door, jabbing the air for emphasis. "What happened?!" 

The lion was mulling things over, contemplating him and deeply considering something.

Keith was more angry and upset than he wanted to let on around Shiro, with a sting of hurt betrayal; he'd trusted the lion to look after Shiro, and Shiro had ended up right back in the worst possible place, with no telling what'd been done to him and no Ulaz to run interference. At the same time, there was the nagging knowledge that the lions had been hit hard, too; he remembered how Black had slumped, sprawled unresponsive and dead-seeming, the way Zarkon had been focused on trying to take any of them - particularly Shiro - out with him. 

There was a rumble of confirmation; the Lion had done everything it could.

He knew it wasn't lying, and it made it worse somehow, knowing that he couldn't actually blame the Black Lion for it. He hated the words "we did all we could".

At least Shiro _had_ survived and they _did_ have him back.

He made a strangled growl, not even caring that he'd failed at covering some of his less human vocal ticks, and punched the metal, ignoring how much his hand hurt from the impact. A few seconds later, he slumped, leaning forward with his forehead propped against the lion.

He wanted to be angry at the lion, but he knew the lion was probably the only thing in the universe more protective of Shiro than he was.

The lion had its own quiet query.

Did he trust it?

He closed his eyes with a faint whine. He felt the echoed trap, the memory of Zarkon snarling at the lion and rejecting outside advice when he was raging with grief. 

He didn't want to, but he did trust the lions; whatever had happened was beyond the lion's control, and the lion had done as much as it could to mitigate things.

There was something else there; a sense to wait and see.

Wait and see, things had not fully played out yet.

Wait and see, it would all make sense in time, and they were still on the track they needed to be on. 

.........................................................

There were a couple days of eating, sleeping, and recovering where Shiro wasn't up to much more than pulling himself together after the ordeal, Keith hovering in and out spending more time in than out, Hunk occasionally delivering gradually more solid soups and mild food. Pidge poked her head in a couple of times, awkwardly fidgeting at the threshold before darting out, and he saw Lance leaning over Hunk's shoulder a few times, with Allura in the background pointing out that Shiro needed his rest and pestering him with questions wouldn't help.

Shiro was stuck without any of his own clothes again, and Keith had resorted to barking at the others to scavenger-hunt the huge expanse of abandoned rooms in the Castle for anything that would fit. The end result was a pile of random clothing, some of it simple and functional, others...

Well, there had clearly been a wide range of cultures and species on the Castle. He could pick out where some of them had come from, but some of them were completely foreign and he wasn't even sure they were meant for a species with entirely the same build.

Most of the species and civilizations involved were probably extinct, which was a sobering thought looking through the relics of the people that had once lived on the Castle. 

Time started to blur in trying to sort what the others had found, the collection spreading out across the floor. There was still something wrong, something nagging that he didn't quite want to acknowledge or pay attention to - as if not looking at it could make it not exist, for at least a little while.

Instead, he just took his time trying to place what sort of origin the different bits of clothing might have had. There was plenty of the clean lines and lighter colors he was used to seeing around the Altean areas, but that had variation - different styles, different cultures, different bits of embellishment here and there. Some of it was cut in ways that wouldn't quite work for a human frame, not examined quite close enough when it was found. 

Then there were some in sharp angles and darker contrasts he was used to seeing around Galra, although some of it had bits of embellishment he wasn't used to seeing on them; patches of embroidery, braided and knotted cord, beadwork, carved badges, always somewhere visible near the collar, worked into the design; some of the others that lacked that kind of addition had small jump rings sewn in where it could be attached less permanently. 

He had to wonder if the Blades he knew would know what it meant and why it was there, or if it was another of the pieces of their culture lost over the ten thousand years of the Empire trying to erase any identity outside of its existence. 

He didn't realize Shiro was awake until one of the occasional shifts and mumbles was less sleepy and more coordinated, black hair flopping out from under the blankets over his shoulder suddenly like something from an old horror movie. He did startle for a moment, caught off guard, then shrank down sheepishly; Shiro peering over his shoulder wasn't that strange, after all.

A quick sideways glance back found a half-awake expression of confusion, Shiro not quite awake enough yet to make connections between thoughts.

"We've been going through the old rooms in the Castle... figured you'd need something again, and there's a lot around here to work with." Really it was a wonder they hadn't started relying more on the alien clothing available, particularly when their old clothes were starting to get a little ratty; Keith had already needed to do a little bit of mending on his things, and he swore he'd seen new stitchwork on some of Lance's clothes.

It was something from home, and going through the old crew quarters for anything felt a little too much like graverobbing still.

"Ah." Shiro shifted, propping his chin up on folded arms on the edge of the bed. "Thanks."

It wasn't much of a surprise that he was still dazed, even if he looked much less near-dead and somewhat less bedraggled.

"I don't think anyone was paying much attention besides 'maybe it might fit'...sometimes not even that," Keith said with weak amusement, holding up something that might have worked....if it didn't have some kind of extra holes and bits in the back for another set of appendages. It got a hint of a half-laugh from Shiro, at least.

He'd gotten most of it spread out, lost in thought about where it'd come from; now he was switching to trying to sort it into things that would probably work, things that might work, and things where it definitely wouldn't work, hastily. "So how're you feeling?"

That nag was there again, harder to tune out; it was a question he genuinely felt like he needed to ask, when he'd had just enough time before the attack on the Command Center to get used to not needing to.

"Human again, I guess. Like I could use a shower." He paused, shifting to tug at a couple stray strands that had decided to tangle into a ragged knot that were threatening to catch on the edge of the bed. "And a haircut. ...And a shave... but not like moving that much yet." 

Keith stuffed the nag back in the back of his mind, gathering up the pile of things that wouldn't be of any use here. "I'll get this cleaned up some, then... you gonna need any help with that hair when that's done?"

Shiro rolled his eyes with a faint snort. "I think I can handle it." 

Keith smiled, but there was still something not right; even with Shiro right there, it still didn't feel like he was back, and Keith was terrified to entertain that enough to figure out why. 

.........................................................

It had been incredibly easy to get Raht under control once the fighter was brought on board. All they had to do was drop the fighter in a seemingly empty hangar and wait for him to come out looking for a fight - with Narti lying in wait. Zethrid had grumbled about not even getting the _fun_ part of knocking someone out before needing to haul their unconscious body around, but she'd drug him into a secure room and helped get restraints set up to make sure he'd stay under control.

Lotor settled in to wait for him to come around, the only other person in the room, idly cleaning and oiling his sword. 

It didn't take very long; one of the advantages of letting Narti knock someone out psychically was that she had some control over how hard they'd be under and how long they'd be out, unlike Zethrid giving them a concussion.

Raht awoke with a surprised snarl, struggling against the unexpected restraints, disoriented for a few ticks before he got some bearings on where he was and his attention fixed on Lotor. He growled, baring teeth.

Lotor barely glanced up, nonchalant and almost bored. "Oh come now. You should have expected that I would be less than pleased with being followed."

"Perhaps if you weren't plotting _treason_ against your own Empire-"

"And _who_ is committing treason against _who_ , if it is 'my' Empire?" He stood from his chair, taking a couple measured steps closer. "I seem to recall you throwing in on plots against me as soon as my ascension was announced." 

"You proved you couldn't be trusted right then and there!" Raht tried to lunge forward uselessly, the cuffs on his wrists attached solidly to the metal behind them. 

"Ah, you mean Throk's reassignment?" Lotor started walking around the standing structure Raht was attached to, keeping a calm and measured pace. "I know full well how your kind work; I wasn't about to leave someone who had already demonstrated a willingness to plot behind my back close to it, but I was still merciful. He's alive, with a post where he is unlikely to be targeted and all the time in the world to consider the changes coming to our universe and whose side he wishes to be on in the end." He paused, behind Raht. "I had hoped you would stop to consider your _own_ allegiances and status before jumping to minion yourself to the next mastermind, but I am fortunately quite accustomed to having my hopes dashed." 

"What makes you think I'm taking orders from anyone?!" 

Despite the general's attempt at covering it, there was a nervous edge to the snarled retort; Raht had always been lousy at subtlety. 

"I know what resources you had on your own, and that cloaking mechanisms of the sort you were using are not among them." He took a few more steps, until he was next to Raht's prosthetic; the general jerked back when he tapped the metal with his sword. "Also the witch's handiwork is ... distinctive; I see you've had a few upgrades." 

Raht glowered, growling at him. "Whatever you're after, you'll never get it from me."

Lotor rolled his eyes. "Of course not. You wouldn't even know the answers anyway; the witch always keeps her pawns in the dark." Another two steps brought him in front of the larger Galra. "And knowing how she works, simply _asking_ would be risking her creeping in to watch over your shoulder." 

Raht didn't have a chance to go from wary confusion to any other reaction as Lotor's sword snapped out, cleaving his head off with a spatter of red across the metal restraints; another swipe down severed the prosthetic, which he took with him after deactivating the cuff holding it in place.

He stalked out, weariness slumping in as soon as the door closed behind him. He could be very _good_ at the kind of brutality the Galra dealt in, no matter how much he hated it; Zarkon had remade the universe so that there was little choice, made it so commonplace that if one wasn't a predator of some stripe, they'd be doomed to be prey. 

And prey had no hope of gaining enough power to change it.

The witch's attempt at using Raht to stalk him proved that his newfound "power" and "freedom of movement" were illlusions; in exile, as long as he stayed quiet, he could avoid too much attention being drawn to any of his projects. Now, he was up against a ticking clock. If he couldn't cement his power and start turning things around fast enough, if he couldn't find some way to remove her from the equation - 

She'd either find some way to revive his father from whatever condition Voltron had left him in, or she would manage to track down everything he'd been hiding over the last few centuries, and that would be the end of it all. 

He was startled out of his thoughts by Kova winding around his ankles, only stopping to headbutt his ankle gently and stare up at him, ears pricked and expression serious.

He scooped the cat up, petting him idly; Kova was the only living thing that'd always been there from the beginning, the only thing that Zarkon and Haggar had never aimed at or tried to take away. 

Of course, Narti was not far behind, taking a couple cautious steps around the corner out of the shadows.

He set Kova down so the cat could hop up onto Narti's shoulder, an angle that would be easier for her to see from. She mimed looking between the severed prosthetic and him, tilting her head in question. 

"I wish it had taken longer. The witch is already trying to get eyes on what we're doing; she wouldn't have told him anything of use." Raht was possessed of the kind of singular, driven fanaticism that made him an easy pawn to anyone who could play into it, too convinced of his part in the Empire to ask questions. 

Narti shifted with a faint, displeased hiss and a nod. 

"We will only have one chance at this - my project must be completed before she can close in to destroy it." 

She nodded, straightening to salute before turning to leave. None of them knew what he was actually working on; he couldn't afford the risk that Haggar or one of the Druids might grab one of them to sift through their memory for what they might know. They accepted it; it wasn't the first time he'd had to keep secrets from them until a plan of his was complete. 

He had enough scaultrite to work with, but what he'd manage to glean from Altean ruins and wrecks for engineering schematics and their wormhole technology was incomplete; he'd be hard pressed to build a teludav, much less adapt it from an interdimensional warp to an interdimensional puncture. Given time he could reconstruct it, but time was something he didn't have. He'd need the Sincline ships online and something to fill in the blanks on the lost Altean technology. Haggar was going to catch up sooner or alter, and if he didn't have enough complete by then to stand up to both her and Zarkon, she would destroy all of it and everything tangentially related - or worse, take it for her own and use it to irrevocably cement the Empire and Zarkon's rule. 

 

As much as he hated it, he couldn't change the universe without surviving and succeeding in it as it was. There was only one true law anymore, even if the shading and meaning changed depending on the angle one was working from - 

 

Victory or Death.


End file.
